We are in – it needs to be shouted from the rooftops every day – a golden age of British soul and jazz. It isn’t just about a few quality artists, either, but a movement. Londoner Yazmin Lacey is key within that: in the past year, she’s featured on stupendous albums by both Ezra Collective and that band’s keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones.
On her second LP she shares producers with Joy Crookes, Little Simz and Kokoroko, all of whom have also recently dropped glorious records – and with Joel Culpepper, who is about to. Many of these acts share other personnel too, a lot of whom came up through the network centred on Trinity Laban school of music and highlighted on Gilles Peterson’s 2018 compilation We Out Here - a network recently given more attention by the Mercury Prize nomination of Trinity alumna Emma-Jean Thackray.
As that suggests, this is hardly a new wave any more – and Teal Dreams is another perfect illustration of its maturity. Each of those other artists’ records have reconfigured past influences to unlock influences from the history of UK music, particularly Black UK music, from any sense of being retro or kitsch and instead become a vocabulary for expressing lives in the present moment. Like Kokoroko’s Tuff Times Never Last especially, Lacey has a love for the smooth sounds of lovers’ rock reggae and quiet storm soul, but where they used that as a vehicle for expressing communal experience and conviviality, she is about personal storytelling, intimacy, often with a mischievous poetic sparkle that more than occasionally evokes Amy Winehouse at her least bleak.
Lacey’s lyrics are consistently intriguing and full of physicality: using interior decorating as erotic metaphor (on “Wallpaper”) is quite something, while the hymn to nature “Wild Things” muses that “down in the deep soil they seem to know it all”. The grooves effortlessly roll together vintage dub, vaudevillian cocktail jazz, the gloriously off-beat funk geometry of the single “Two Steps” and more – sometimes meandering a little through the album, but ending devastatingly with the showstopping ballad “Long Way Around”. There’s nothing high tech, no signifiers of modernity, but this record absolutely sounds like London 2025, like an expression of hopes, fears and aspirations in the modern world. It’s not, perhaps, as instant as Kokoroko or Ezra Collective, but it’s rich and rewarding and a very worth contribution to this movement indeed.
Listen to "Two Steps":
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