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.
From the looks of “An Introduction,” a brief video she dropped a month before the album, the trio get along famously; she, “Al,” and Ford wearing a paper bag all ham it up in between vocal takes. She jokes about giving the studio a “feminine touch” by hanging roses from the ceiling. “There’s a feminine aspect to it,” she says of *Belladonna *and her limited aesthetic influence. “I think that that’s what I was trying to bring in—but at the same time, having this grit like a horror film would have. I wanted it to be murderous.”
The clip pulls back the curtain on Belladonna’s deceit: This is an Alex Turner album passed off as Savior’s simply because she sang it. Her vocal affectations so closely mirror the languid elasticity of her mentor’s that they come off as impressions instead of articulations of original thought. Turner’s musical ticks are so distinct that they’re instantly recognizable when someone else tries to dress them up as their own. Direct lines can be drawn from “Do I Wanna Know?,” “Crying Lightning,” and scores of Arctic Monkeys and Last Shadow Puppets singles to the bulk of Belladona’s ebbing bass lines and spooky chord progressions. “Mirage” hits a little too close to home with its stage-name games and persona dress-up: “She's almost like a million other people/That you'll never really get to know/And it feels as if she's swallowing me whole” would serve as wry commentary and a portrait of an alter-ego if Savior herself wasn’t leading an album that sounds like it could slip into an Arctic Monkeys set with a simple pronoun swap.
But Belladona isn’t without its charms, and Savior succeeds in delivering that “murderous” quality she was after. The ceaseless cavalcade of minor chords and eerie, campy vibes perfected by Turner lend themselves especially well to “Bones” and “Mystery Girl.” Turns of Belladona even resemble Tarantino in their enthusiasm for vintage noir and suspense, like “Vanishing Point,” which is ripe for licensing for any manner of stabby plot points in the CW’s latest blood-spattered drama (her demo for “Risk”—another collaboration with Turner and Ford—appeared on the second season of “True Detective”’s soundtrack). Her voice and affectations are so guided by the heavy hands of Turner and Ford that Belladonna of Sadness is largely indistinguishable from their work: At best, Savior is a muse for her own introduction; at worst, she’s a conduit who’s yet to prove that she can hold her own with the company she keeps.
