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Sophie Ellis-Bextor
HANA
Cooking Vinyl
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Tucked away on Make a Scene (2011), Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s fourth studio album, is “Cut Straight to the Heart.” One of three restrained midtempos/outliers to feature amongst the flashier dance-pop sides on the record, this piece had to have felt doubly strange functioning as its coda; the song was Ellis-Bextor’s first creative pairing with fellow British musician Ed Harcourt. No one knew it then, but “Cut Straight to the Heart” was the planting of a collaborative seed soon to flower across Wanderlust (2014) and Familia (2016), Ellis-Bextor’s fifth and sixth sets respectively.
And now we’ve finally arrived at HANA (花) (Japanese for “flower” or “blossom”)—Ellis-Bextor’s much-anticipated seventh project and first on the Cooking Vinyl label. This is not to say that the singer-songwriter hasn’t kept busy since the issuance of Familia. In that interval, Ellis-Bextor issued a collection of orchestral reworkings of select back catalog gems, put forward a formal best-of, released a live album (her first!), and wrote an acclaimed memoir and cookbook. To say nothing of her position as the mistress of the “Kitchen Disco” ceremony.
But, for a time, new music seemed to be a far-off prospect—no longer. Like Wanderlust and Familia prior, Ellis-Bextor reteams with Harcourt as her primary co-writer and producer as she further expands on her own singular pop genre realm. Richard Jones, bassist for The Feeling and Ellis-Bextor’s husband, joins as a co-producer. The kaleidoscopic-aesthetic core of the album came out of emotions Ellis-Bextor experienced on a trip to Tokyo in early 2020 with her mother and eldest son. This sojourn occurred just ahead of the COVID-19 outbreak, she’d gone in her stepfather’s stead due to his ill health prohibiting travel. Later, amid the pandemic and her stepfather’s eventual passing, Ellis-Bextor tinkered at what soon became HANA.
A sensorial blend of melancholia, escape, reflection, and surrealism (in both its words and music), the long player begins with the art-pop cinema of “A Thousand Orchids”; Ellis-Bextor has maintained her penchant for galvanic album openers. Having transfixed listeners with that number, she effortlessly pirouettes into the groovy chamber-funk of “Breaking the Circle.” It’s quite a one-two punch to start things off and the record continues onward with one engrossing aural miniature after another.
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There are immediate standouts that announce themselves: the handsome new wave snapper of “Everything Is Sweet,” the pop-soul breeziness of “Lost in the Sunshine,” and the melodic dance-punk excursion “Hearing in Colour.” Still, every cut here feels special, capable of functioning alone or as part of a greater whole. Vocally, Ellis-Bextor is in bewitching form throughout HANA, approximating passion (“Tokyo”) and observational cool (“We’ve Been Watching You”) in equal measure.
An inventive use of the deeper synth-pop colors and alternative rock tones (matched to varying tempos) on HANA keeps familiar sounds fresh, while giving Ellis-Bextor space to sketch out something different—like the modish psychedelia of “We’ve Been Watching You.” Discerning Ellis-Bextor fans, who have championed her non-single cuts, B-sides and her earlier Britpop incarnation with theaudience, will be thrilled with the 12 tracks presented. But outsiders will be curious too, mostly because nothing on this offering is inaccessible or overindulgent, just politely esoteric, and experimental.
From the beginning, Ellis-Bextor always understood that style and substance do not have to be mutually exclusive ideas. HANA is proof positive of this belief, and it stands as a current career triumph.
Notable Tracks: “Hearing in Colour” | “Lost in the Sunshine” | “A Thousand Orchids” | “We’ve Been Watching You”
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