How you perceive this album will very much depend on your liking for eighties nostalgia. Still only in her thirties, Californian artist Chrystia ‘Tia’ Cabral mines the era, despite not having grown up then.
Cabral has an incredible, beautifully soulful voice,and the production quality is undoubtedly high. However, tracks like ‘Alibi’ feel like the worst excesses of the decade of capitalism and mass unemployment..how little things have changed. It’s like a seasoned soul singer auditioning for Bat Out of Hell- The Musical.
The influences come thick and fast: Pat Benatar; power ballads, a preening Jon Bon Jovi, and classy ladies in shoulder pads with coiffed hair, as a wind machine blows said tresses in a neon -lit church. ‘Ammunition ‘ is as camp as a Prince twirl, but with the heavy- handed values of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It almost verges on pastiche at times.
The title track fares a little better, as it’s more subtle, but in the main, the sheer overblown camp rawk cliches are jarring for those of us who liked-and still like – music with more grit in the pearls.
Out via Sacred Bones on March 28th.
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