Birmingham singer Laura Mvula has been garnering plenty of adoring reviews across the pond. Even before her debut album Sing to the Moon was released in Britain, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Critics Choice Award at the 2013 BRIT awards. Since the album was released, Mvula’s bright-hued retro-soul has been praised to the heavens for originality while simultaneously being compared to the luminary likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Much of the praise is richly deserved. Sing to the Moon, which was just released here in the States, is a triumph of arrangement and melody: Songs like opener “Like the Morning Dew”, or the gorgeous title track, combine earworm hooks with beautiful, uniquely shaped verses, and showcase the open-hearted faith in the world that is clearly Mvula’s calling card. Even when her lyrics communicate melancholy, it seems the singer has no choice but to sound defiantly anti-blue.
The formal complexity of Mvula’s best songs is testament to an education at the esteemed Birmingham Conservatoire, whose graduates often stray towards jazz, opera, and classical composition. You can hear that training in the stately processional entrance of “Make Me Lovely”, which soon blooms into a full-fledged, powerful chorus, or in the prettily drawn piano and alternating tones of “I Don’t Know What the Weather Will Be”. Beyond her studied compositional ear, Mvula’s voice is also a winning draw. There’s a hitch in her dusky alto that recalls a mix of Jill Scott and a demure version of Amy Winehouse. Her voice is classically beautiful but there’s enough oddity-- a sort of gravelly undertone-- in her pronunciation to keep it interesting throughout the album.
A lot of anonymity is built into Mvula’s topics of choice: beauty, love, faith, heartbreak, and hardship are all discussed on the album with the same generalized air. This can be a strength when it comes to pop songwriting-- the stories here are universal enough to be broadly relatable. But Mvula shines when she gets a bit more personal: She shows a snappy attitude on the show tune-like “That’s Alright”, an affirmation of her faith in who she is, which doubles as one of the most exciting tracks here. Mvula sounds best on her more upbeat songs, so it's a shame there are so few of them.
It’s an odd choice, given the success of singles "Green Garden" and "Like the Morning Dew", to fill the album with so many slow-burning, hopeful anthems. Though they show off Mvula’s vocal talents as well as anything else here, over the full record they can become mundane and somewhat repetitious. “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Father Father” might work as one-offs for someone encountering Mvula’s voice and compositional abilities for the first time. But they sink in comparison to the songs they follow, leaving the album with almost 10 minutes of under-utilized space.
Mvula's music hearkens back to an earlier era than that of her many British contemporaries: She hovers on the edge of pop, but the majority of her songs are too reserved to fully break through. Mvula's debut is filled with visceral and musical beauty--that is its strong spot. Once she rids her work of thematic repetition and lyrical mundanity, she'll be on to something truly special.
