Albums
Belladonna of Sadness
2017
Genre: Alternative
Release Date: 2017
By Hilary Hughes
Reviewed April 19, 2017
The young American singer launches her career with a slinky, vintage album featuring production from Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner—though it sounds more like Turner side-project than a showcase debut.
Alexandra Savior has a penchant for clever wordplay and a voice that can hypnotize, terrorize, or both in four measures or less. Her YouTube covers favored the elongated swoons of Adele and Angus & Julia Stone ballads before she found a fan in Courtney Love and signed to Columbia. For her first full-length, she teamed up with Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and producer James Ford whose production credits pepper the vast majority of Turner’s output. But instead of a debut album that flaunts the dynamism of a new artist, the result is an album that barely even feels like one—or, at the very least, only vaguely resembles a collaborative effort that casts Savior as the hostess of Turner’s discount ideas.