Spectreview: Sudan Archives – Athena

-LIGHT CORAL-

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“‘Cause when you looked down on me
I knew just what to do
You started to run away
And now you wish you could”

To Brittany Parks, blackness is all-encompassing and as unavoidable as breath, but it’s not only about pride in identity; it’s also about a complete commitment to honesty, to refusing to cheat yourself when so many outside forces are vying to cheat you. Athena, Parks’ first full-length as Sudan Archives, dives into the personal and reshapes it into the universal, but does so amid some of the most exciting neo-soul/R&B crossover tunes released this year. As a student of ethnomusicology and an accomplished self-taught violinist, Parks is more aware than most of the cracks that lay unfilled in contemporary American popular music, and throughout the record one can sense her striving to nestle into those untouched places. “Confessions” bears all the trademarks of a killer pop single, but it’s built from unassuming parts: that lithe, diving violin hook, those staccato sixteenth pops that shift into hand claps and back, that flowing orchestral background, and other tiny details that lend the track a wondrous uniqueness. The violin itself isn’t a gimmick, instead finding myriad ways to provide a voice parallel to Parks’ own. On the mournful, lucid “Down on Me,” and the skittering, anxious “Green Eyes”  it takes the form of verse-building pizzicato loops that morph into responses to choral calls; on the funky “Glorious” it’s a foundational fiddle. It’s overall still based in shiny modern production, all slate and angular, but perhaps, in a perverse way, that’s the point. In Athena, Sudan Archives doesn’t seem an iota interested in looking back, choosing instead to surge bravely, confidently, into a new future.

Recommended for state-of-the-art coffee shops.