- Who is Neneh Cherry? That's what many younger music fans will be asking, and it's a question to which there is no easy answer. The step-daughter of jazz musician Don Cherry, Neneh was born in Sweden and spent much of her early life in New York, but always seemed very London (where she later lived for 20 years). She was part of the post-punk group Rip Rig + Panic before morphing, in the '80s, into a streetwise antidote to Madonna (her "Buffalo Stance" is one of that era's great pop-dance tracks). A precursor to female MCs such as M.I.A., she has collaborated with everyone from Youssou N'Dour and Gorillaz to avant-garde riot-jazz trio The Thing. In short, Cherry is a genuine bohemian, a creative one-off who moves easily between pop and experimental music, bringing not just her idiosyncratic vocals—she's in turns a rapper, street soul diva and punk shrieker—but an ineffable cool to her every project.
Blank Project may be Cherry's first "solo" album in 17 years, but she never stopped making music, and she clearly has a knack for finding the right people to work with. The album was produced by Kieran Hebden, and is fundamentally a collaboration with Ben and Tom Page, AKA RocketNumberNine. Purveyors of an often manic melange of afrojazz, post-rock and techno, the Page brothers prove the perfect foil for Cherry, as they switch between the stripped-back beat poetry of opener "Across The Water" and the title track's aggro soundclash of trashed drums and awesome bass.
Blank Project was recorded in just five days, in a (pretty successful) bid to retain its raw immediacy. Its best tracks are toweringly good. On "Spit Three Times," restrained and brooding pads are a sensitive fit for Cherry's tales of love as a dangerous mania. The closer "Everything" is a delirious take on elegiac, Zomby-ish bass music. The album's key track, "Weightless," trumps both. Propelled by a heavy, distorted bassline and a clanging cowbell, and later pivoting around a tense, bleeping breakdown (Cherry's cantering vocal is almost a rhythm track in its own right), it evokes both the muscular punk-funk of Spektrum and Cherry's one-time mentors, The Slits. Lyrically, this may be the work of a 49 year-old woman, with its ruminations on family, married life and paying the bills, but, in terms of its energy and sheer lust for life, it could not sound fresher.
Tracklist01. Across The Water
02. Blank Project
03. Naked
04. Spit Three Times
05. Weightless
06. Cynical
07. 422
08. Out Of The Black feat. Robyn
09. Dossier
10. Everything