The past 10 years of pop music have Neneh Cherry’s fingerprints all over them, from the unruly conglomerations of genres that have come to define much of the Hot 100 to the uncountable number of female singers who’ve borrowed directly or indirectly from the club-diva-meets-art-school-b-girl playbook that made a smash out of her 1988 single “Buffalo Stance”. It’s become painfully obvious that her status as a one-hit wonder has far less to do with her talents than how far she was ahead of her time.
Cherry’s early work has aged well. In 2012, she returned from a hiatus initiated after the back to back flops of the alt-rock-leaning follow-ups to her 1989 debut Raw Like Sushi (1996’s Man didn’t even get a U.S. release) with an album-length collaboration with the Scandinavian experimental jazz outfit the Thing that leaned heavy on dissonant avant-funk and turned the cliche of the club diva’s late-career “jazzy” phase on its ear. A companion collection of remixes, including one by Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, followed. That crossing of paths has now led to Cherry album produced by Hebden that finally finds her returning to the basic—and hard to improve upon—combination of vocals and beats.
Blank Project isn’t a roaring, triumphant return to form. Instead it’s understated to the extreme, a master class in the ways in which simple pleasures can become fascinatingly deep. The opening track, “Across the Water”, is simply Cherry singing over a bracingly austere drum arrangement, with zero in the way of melodic accompaniment. Between her rich, unembellished voice and emotional performance it’s somehow more overwhelming than most songs that have full orchestral backing.
From that point, things pick up a little, although only by degrees. The rest of the songs have basslines, but only about half go further to add lightly sketched synth parts on top. Some of the tracks push at the upper boundary of what’s normally considered mid-tempo, but most fit comfortably within that range. There are no grand stylistic gestures or unnecessary moving parts or anything that qualifies as fussy.
And yet within those parameters, Cherry and Hebden find a wealth of moods and modes to play with. The title track takes the ricocheting rhythms of drum’n’bass and floods its normally icy aura with warmth and organic dirt that Cherry half-sings, half-raps over; her delivery is forceful despite the fact that she barely raises her voice above a conversational level. “Spit Three Times” conjures up a woozy, paranoid atmosphere and a slow-grinding trip-hop beat out of what seems like mostly negative space. “Out of the Black”, featuring a vocal assist by Cherry acolyte Robyn, feels like an ecstatic club-pop anthem played with the subdued confidence of someone well beyond the point of caring whether anyone else gets turned up over it or not.
Minimalism is all the rage in the more hip-hop-aligned parts of the pop world, making Blank Project feel modern and stylish without exactly sounding fashionable. The album, and the woman steering it, are not only comfortable with their eccentricities but strengthened by them, and the effect is enthralling—not to mention a thorough schooling for the performers working in Cherry’s wake on how exactly to do the dead-cool, stripped-down thing. As such, it’s not hard at all to pick up some of her old “Buffalo Stance” cockiness in it. It’s a rare pleasure to see a musician who was under-appreciated during her heyday have a delayed influence a later generation of artists while she’s still in good working condition. It’s even rarer, and even more pleasurable, to see her staying a few lengthy strides ahead of the game.
