Laura Mvula - The Dreaming Room

Pitchfork 78

Laura Mvula, the soul singer from Birmingham, England, doesn’t really sound like anyone but herself. She’s often compared to other neo-soul artists, both those who shared her classical training, like Amy Winehouse, and those who don’t, like Jill Scott. The shoe that fits best doesn’t quite fit anyone: Mvula shares considerable DNA with Nina Simone, most obviously in her unyielding charisma, her musical virtuosity, and her profoundly central blackness. Mvula’s voice also shares some of Simone’s rawness, as well as its facility juxtaposing vulnerability and strength. She can sound supernaturally powerful, as on the wailed hook from “Green Garden,” off her first album, 2013’s Sing to the Moon; at other times she softens into nursery melodies, sung over a twinkle. And she recalls Simone’s era most, perhaps, in her epigrammatic lyrics: “Round the mountain all God’s children run,” she repeats, in “Overcome,” a song from her spectacular new album, The Dreaming Room, lyrics that indirectly reference Maya Angelou over the unmistakable funk guitar of Nile Rodgers.

But Mvula’s sound doesn’t scan retro or referential. Rather, it feels visionary, and somewhat out of time. The Dreaming Room is a consolidation of Mvula’s dramatic instincts, her ability to burnish alienation and longing and bravery into set pieces saturated with coolly psychedelic soul. She’s a mannered artist with a degree in composition, and she favors careful and narrative orchestral accompaniment—she released a live version of Sing to the Moon, backed up by Metropole Orkest, and the London Symphony Orchestra provides backing on this album—that’s arranged more minimally and efficiently than its occasionally staggering effect would suggest. On The Dreaming Room, she and producer Troy Miller frame her voice with a slate of odd instruments; upright bass, vibraphone, strings, a jazzy celeste, all faithfully recorded—on “Show Me Love,” memorably, you can hear the pedals on her piano.

Mvula’s reach is pop, but her form is classical. She expresses broad sentiments through abstract constructions; her melodies evolve at a clip, communicating directly but rarely giving you a hook you could repeat back. The result is most recognizable as theater, an impression heightened by the way Mvula hides in plain sight as a character, singing stage-play lines like “I will always remember/Our memories and journeys/And carry them always in my heart.” The penultimate song is actual theater: Mvula impersonates her grandmother to reconstruct a phone call between them—inspired, as she told Annie Mac, by skits on Kanye West albums, which she became acquainted with only recently. The skits felt “as important as the music,” she said. On “Nan,” both she and her grandmother are weary: as Nan, Mvula says, “Write a song I can lift me spirits, write a song I can jig me foot.”

Mvula maintains some character distance for most of the album. When she does flip to her most personal, the changes are subtle, but the difference is arresting. In “Show Me Love,” one of the best tracks, she comes in on a single note and a swung, sustained phrase: “Oh God I need to belong to someone I miss the breath and the kiss I miss to wonder the future with somebody oh god show me love.” She keeps going, cycling the lines back like she’s chanting in front of an altar, letting her voice scratch and tug. Throughout the song, she changes characters by adjusting her vocal delivery: you can hear her singing about herself, to herself, then as herself, moving through time. Mvula has recently talked about panic attacks that surrounded the breakup of her marriage: the song transposes that story into something beautiful, swelling to a chorus that booms with timpani and strings.

The Dreaming Room, as a whole, replicates this sequence: uncertainty, a fugue, transcendence. Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies. It begins with a question of worth, then an exhortation to strength, then a plea for help; the fourth song is encouragement, the fifth exhaustion, the sixth attraction, the seventh a desperate and divine love, the ninth a goodbye. The album zooms out, ending heavily and happily: there’s “People,” a soothsaying song about black resilience, then “Phenomenal Woman,” a loving collective flex. It’s a pat narrative, made nearly invisible by many abrupt switches and strange moments. Ideas glimmer and then disappear; floods of major and minor emotions brush up against each other, in conflict and in concert. Memories return, too: her last album’s title track is reprised on “Renaissance Moon,” and the funk of the album-opener bubbles through halfway on “Let Me Fall,” and then again at the end. There are many resolutions in the story, and none of them final.

The result is an album that feels much longer than the 36 minutes it takes up end to end. As with a stage play, The Dreaming Room requires a rigorous type of attention. It pays dividends, and yet Mvula’s artistry doesn’t require this particular type of staging to show through. In 2013, SOHN and Shlohmo remixed “Green Garden” and “She,” respectively—isolating and iterating single phrases to immensely suggestive effect. Any one of the many melodic ideas in any of these restlessly blooming songs could serve as the foundation for another song, and a magnificent one. But then again, why prune a garden when it’s so formidably beautiful as-is?