Lafawndah’s debut LP Ancestor Boy announced her on a wider stage as someone willing to take risks and run with them. A brash mix of experimental dance and globally minded pop, the album was as exciting as it was confounding. In that same spirit, The Fifth Season, her first release of original material since then, is another sharp left turn.
She’s lost none of her experimentalism, but this time, she’s channeling it into a more live-feeling body of work. The Fifth Season is minimalist, full of space and light, like a development of her 2018 EP, Le Renard Bleu, with the Japanese composer Midori Takada, and their one-off performance of their piece “Ceremonial Blue” at London’s Barbican Hall. Album closer “Le Malentendu” is a rare example of Lafawndah sharing vocal duties, this time with French rapper Lala &ce. Rather than cluttering the mix, the contrast between the two vocal timbres—Lafawndah light and airy, &ce rich and grounded—opens the track up further, allowing Lafawndah to feel her own limits. It’s a welcome reminder of the sparse magnetism of her live shows, a touchstone in a time of distant connection.
With The Fifth Season, she slows everything down, stripping back the harsh, abstract instrumental productions of Ancestor Boy, affording her the time and space to explore other genres. “You, at the End” is built around a horn motif that subtly grows and adapts while anchoring the track, taking it in a jazzier direction. “The Stillness” is anything but still; it’s a slowly expanding web of drones and polyrhythms, carefully coordinated and vibrating with anxious energy, the feeling that anything could happen.
In all of her work, Lafawndah has centered her voice as an instrument. On The Fifth Season, however, she treats it with the same gravity, care, and potential for variability as a violin. On opener “Old Prayer,” she goes from a quiet plaintive lament to a cry that reverberates, giving the impression that the higher powers she invokes are sung into being through her. Her voice on “L’Imposteur” is layered with a Vocoder-like effect that’s an uncanny mimic of Lafawndah’s own occasional and subtle vibrato; with it, she dresses up as herself, trying on different aspects of her own personality to see which fits. On album single “Don’t Despair,” she sings as close as she can to a whisper without losing her stringent sense of melody, delivering a discordant message of tentative hope.
The Fifth Season is imbued with the tension and power of a live instrumental performance, at once intriguing and nerve-wracking. Throughout the album, Lafawndah embodies a purposeful fluidity of genre and role that makes her difficult to pin down, someone completely comfortable walking in their path no matter how it might appear to an outside observer. With this latest release, she complicates the labels of “dance music artist,” “composer,” and “performer” by synthesizing them, embodying all three at once and allowing herself to get lost in the boundless possibilities of each.
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