When Charlotte Cardin is at her best, though, it feels like she’s alone in a room with you. Perhaps that’s because her lyrics are clearly sensual: the chorus in “Dirty Dirty” talks about washing her dirty thoughts off her. It’s not subtle, but it’s successful because it’s not. The instrumentation is dripping with atmosphere, and oozing with sensuality.

Everybody’s been talking about the jazzy take she has on pop music, but truth be told, I don’t hear a lot of jazz in it. There’s definitely a French jazz influence — Charlotte Cardin’s Montreal heritage is readily apparently — but the influence largely extends to the rhythm. This is pop music through and through. It’s sensual, and it’s fascinating, but it’s pop. “Les échardes” — an excellent song, by the way — is the closest she gets to traditional jazz. (It’s impeccably well done, and I’d love to hear Cardin do more like it.)

What’s great about Cardin is that her voice is completely natural. There’s no autotune here. On the Apple Music version of the album, there are two bonus videos of her performing “Big Boy” and “Les échardes.” It’s revealing of two things: her music is incredibly minimal. The production on the record is deceiving, because it sounds bigger than it is. When those trappings are lifted, the music takes on an air that’s intimate and special.

The second thing it reveals is the quality of Cardin’s voice: there isn’t a hint of autotune here, and she hits every note exactly how it is on the record. Charlotte Cardin’s vocal performance is impeccable and haunting — nearly angelic if it weren’t so sexual. I’m looking forward to a complete LP from her in the future.

The post Charlotte Cardin: Big Boy — EP appeared first on Unsung Sundays.

But it feels like ALA.NI has arrived from another era. It’s as if she spent most of her life hanging out with Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. YOU & I is the sort of record that people don’t make anymore: the songs don’t cradle themselves within theatrics, and share more in common with lullabies than anything we might consider jazz or pop today.

But there’s a sense of innocence throughout the record that it feels like we’ve lost. That innocence, which I feel we traded in for sophistication, is what makes ALA.NI so memorable. Her subtle choral effects have something in common with Feist, but it doesn’t feel likely she’s ever listened to Feist.

“Ol Fashioned Kiss” is exactly the sort of song that a person steeped in the Jazz Age would write, and it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful largely because it’s about a kiss: there isn’t any innuendo here. It’s not a slutty song about somebody’s birthday.

It would be easy to mistake this innocence for naïveté, but tracks like “Darkness at Noon” (which has a stupendous chorus) suggest that ALA.NI isn’t foreign to emotional trauma. It’s just that she chooses to frame the experience of life through lenses that are different from how we’re used to hearing it.

YOU & I is over almost as quickly as it begins. Many tracks are under three minutes long, and some are under two. When the album is over, you’re left with the rare sensation that it just wasn’t long enough. ALA.NI might be emulating a style we’ve long forgotten, but for many of us, hearing it again is an emotionally powerful sensation. It’s such a rarity to hear music that, at its most basic level, still packs an incredible emotional punch.

I immediately hit Play again, and put the record on repeat. I suspect that you’ll do the same.

The post ALA.NI: YOU & I appeared first on Unsung Sundays.

On Unsung, I don’t typically recommend compilation albums. That’s for several reasons: they don’t usually represent the best of what artists have to offer, and it is the belief of this publication that the album, as a format, is more popular than a collection of singles will ever be. But in Frank’s case, that’s a bit different. He was making music in an era when the album wasn’t valued like it was in its pre-iTunes heyday: then, like now, all the money was in singles. So that’s what labels pushed for.

In that sense, a collection of singles is possibly the best way to hear the genius of Sinatra’s. It’s one unstoppable hit after the other in a series of groovy jazzy hits. There’s nobody better than Sinatra at this, and there’s been no better occasion to celebrate his mastery of the musical form.

He did it his way, after all.

The post Frank Sinatra: Nothing But The Best appeared first on Unsung Sundays.