For an artist whose bio reads that she was “born in 1784 in the backseat of a sea-foam green space pinto,” L.A.-based soul singer Kadjha Bonet’s debut LP The Visitor sounds a bit closer to home than that. Her sound is retro-fitted, but you only have to travel to, say, the experimental jazz-meets-soul-meets-singer-songwriter traditions of 1974 to find her home planet. Her voice twists Roberta Flack’s velvet tone around the archness of Shirley Bassey over creamery-rich strings, producing a sound as familiar as it is haunting.
“Honeycomb” is the album’s lead single, and alongside mid-album tracks “Nobody Other” and “Portrait of Tracy” it sets forth the best case for Bonet. Both are couched in a majestic sort of of blaxploitation soul, a mix of half-remembered Bond themes and the string section from Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 epic Superfly. Bonet's voice is the twist in the fabric, the element that sends the song down a Lewis Carroll rabbit hole; her falsetto on “Nobody Other” creates a vortex where the Isley Brothers’ and Aaliyah’s version of “At Your Best” meet. It also features a rolling Hammond organ, another classic crate-dust sound.
Bonet employs the intentional oxymoron “fickle majesty” in “Honeycomb’”s lyrics, and the phrase is also an apt description for the album. The Visitor is an amazing virtuoso performance, both for Bonet’s voice and for the many instruments she plays on it. However, the songwriting loops and twirls around styles and concepts that traditionally have straight-line meanings, and it creates a bit of ear fatigue, especially when so much of the album sits in a luxurious mid-tempo. On “Fairweather Friend,” Bonet discovers the limits of a friend’s loyalty and mourns it with a cool, laconic vocal that drains all the sorrow of the song. The trilling harplike ripples behind her are lovely, but the song is a little inert.
Bonet can’t be faulted for ambition; the plush arrangements bring to mind Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid in their scope and scale. “Francisco” swirls together late-’60s Beatles psychedelia and “Walk On By” woodwinds into something that might be called “Sgt. Pepper soul.” On the title track she delivers the impressionistic lines “Skin the color copper/She comes without a call” in an overwhelmed rush. Immediately thereafter, “The Visitor” spills into a well-composed orchestral mini-suite and closes with a vocal run that displays the stunning full breadth of her voice.
But The Visitor doesn't quite equal the sum total of its impressive pieces. Like a lot of talented artists working underneath their potential, Bonet offers a collection of familiar references, immaculately recreated, without telling us something about herself that we might hold onto. She is a master at her craft, but she hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to say just yet.
