Karma – Late Night Daydreaming
April 27th, 2007 by rui
It’s not every day Pete Lawrence says ‘I think this is the best downtempo album of the year’…
Late Night Daydreaming lollops along from vocal track to instrumental to vocal track. Often that’s a warning sign – ‘here are the Songs we worked really hard to finesse, and there are the half-finished tracks we didn’t get a vocal on’ – in this case, the instrumentals are at least as stong as the vocal tracks.
The opener – ‘All You Ever Wanted’ – evokes the X-press 2 classic ‘A Little More Time’, but where that song was a singalong-and-hug-a-stranger club anthem – this is more of a back at your mates house for the afters song. Sweeping strings, chimes, and an insistent, breathless vocal from Jerome Stokes package up melody’s as hooky as a New Order bassist. When it ends, you want to zip back and listen again, but before you get a chance to hit the buttons Michelle Amador has launched into ‘Are We?’. The jazz-tinged vocal over a lovely acoustic guitar and half-time rhythm is a bit Koop-ish, without straying into out and out jazz.
The instrumental tracks Carte Blanche, Beach Towel, Shoreline Drive and Sleeping Beauty combine interesting chord progressions with arrangements that build gently using lush strings, simple repetitive acoustic guitar parts, floaty piano comps and light-as-a-feather (if there at all) drums. Consistently brilliant – you can see why Pete warmed to this so much – pure Big Chill vibes.
At the tail end of the Late Night Daydreaming, the third guest vocalist Oezlem Cetin really shines on ‘The Way You Are’ – epic, heartbreaking stuff.
The German producers Lars Dorch and Tom Dams have been exploring jazz/club fusions since the early nineties, with much-sampled early recordings, and recent forays into soundtrack work – which shows in the faultless production. Has anyone coined the phrase widescreen jazzbient? Well they have now…
Last December’s release for Late Night Daydreaming was probably a bit mis-timed. Stick this on the car or campervan stereo when setting off on a summer road trip and make sure the journey’s longer than the length of the album – otherwise you’ll only end up driving round the block until it finishes.
Late Night Daydreaming by Karma is out now on Compost Records.
