- Klein shows that you don't need classical instruments to make a classical album.
- The radical freedom of Klein is a wonder to behold. The British-Nigerian artist's individual approach to making music eschews most qualifying adjectives. (Better put, she does whatever the hell she wants.) If you say she's making experimental music, she might call it pop. If you call her a sound collagist, she'll tell you she doesn't know what that means. So when she announced that she was releasing her newest album, Harmattan, on the esteemed classical label Pentatone, it was pointless to try and predict what she might come up with. The LP was initially meant to be recorded with an orchestra, but the pandemic made that impossible. Instead of delaying the record's production, Klein, ever determined, made what she had at home in South London sound like a well-resourced concert hall. With the help of digital effects, footsteps became percussion, a harmonica morphed into a tuba, a piano became a string section.
Klein's previous work was driven by intimacy, with visceral and vulnerable sounds that reduce the gap between artist and listener to something like a secret whispered in an ear. Harmattan, on the other hand, uses the language of classical music to create emotional distance that never gets more specific than a mood. With its grand orchestral-style arrangements, its attention to acoustic instruments like solo piano and horns and almost no vocals, the album isn't that far off from what comes to mind when you think of a Western classical record.
Harmattan's sonic atmospheres are full of long, steady strokes that evoke the stillness and control of a landscape painting. Big enough to hold space for all kinds of listeners, they can be welcoming or ominous, happy or sad. Like a Rorschach test, interpretation is fluid and highly subjective. To engage with this amorphous universality and its detachment from the personal might feel risk-averse at first, but after living with the record for some time, it begins to feel like a special kind of freedom.
Thematically, Klein avoids classical music's tropes by opting for breadth and cheekiness over cohesion and gravitas. "Roc" takes its name from the Roc Nation brunch, the Black celebrity kiki that lights up social media feeds every year and where a young Klein once longed to be. In this muse one might see the carefully constructed rules and artifice of opulence, the weight of jewelry and status, the choreography of clout. But Klein seems to hear drones, virtuosic saxophones, off-kilter chimes and a feeling of clutter and clang that brings to mind the unravelling that precedes total chaos; its dissonance signals the confusion that occurs when you realize that a place you've dreamed of is not all it's cracked up to be.
On "Ray," the ghost of R&B bad boy Ray J (whose messy love life is fodder for reality television) haunts a gloomy epic made of ambient drone sounds that crest and fall with such slow, devastating grace it feels Shakespearean. The muted industrial rattle of "Trappin in C Major" also has the grandeur of an orchestral piece—you can almost imagine its percussive elements being banged out on a bass drum by a man in a tailcoat with felt-covered mallets—which is hilarious, because these are exactly the drum sounds Klein recorded running down the stairs at home.
All these loose threads set the stage for the album's centerpiece, "Hope Dealers." The standout track is bittersweet and its intensely bright synth arrangement unfurls with both the inviting brilliance and disinviting glare of the sun, beautifully embracing the extremes of duality. It's an incredible piece, without which the record might flounder. At times the expanse of the album's ideas can feel like they aren't all fully realized. The opener, “For Solo Piano,” has so many gaps, it becomes a little too easy for the mind to wander while the affecting piano work on “Made For Ibadan” feels like it ends before it can reach a meaningful emotional peak. “Skyfall,” the only song with vocals, pleasantly brings to mind Klein's older work, but unfortunately just isn't as captivating. In these instances, the album's overall lack of intimacy doesn't feel weightless so much as a bit hollow.
As a whole though, Harmattan skillfully brings together the staid vocabulary of classical music with the dynamic vocabulary of popular culture. It works because it doesn't read as annoyingly calculated, it's an extension of the media she regularly consumes and her natural proclivity for provocation. “Hans Zimmer, your time is up bruv!,” she said recently to Gal-Dem. Klein's mission is not to assert her own dominance in classical music but to show that anyone can do it. “No one man should have all that power,” another influential artist once said before he fell off the deep end. It remains an urgent point that artists don't make enough without the taint of ego, so to see Klein attack it with such earnesty and confidence truly feels radical.
Tracklist01. for solo / piano
02. roc
03. trapping in C major
04. unknown opps
05. the haunting of grace
06. ray
07. made for ibadan
08. skyfall feat. Charlotte Church
09. not a gangster but still from endz
10. hope dealers
11. champions