- A 93-minute epic of modern classical and drone partly inspired by a '90s religious TV drama.
- Klein's music is not governed by any rules. Attempting to map out the terrain of her music is a mission doomed to fail from the outset. And she doesn't help much either. In an interview with Gal-dem, she brought up the track "Ray," off of 2019's Lifetime LP, and said, "Some of it is about Ray J and that’s it. There’s no further meaning. It's a drone track and I was thinking of Ray J." Whether she's being serious or not—and she probably is—it points to how her music doesn't aim to evoke images of tangible places or scenes. It's more about condensing the indistinct matter of a memory or emotion.
Klein's seventh solo album, touched by an angel, is titled after a Christian TV show she used to watch with her mother, where three angels are sent to Earth to tell troubled people that God loves them. The angels in the context of Klein's touched by an angel, meanwhile, feel more aligned with the biblically accurate kind, the type to preface their appearances with a "do not be afraid" only to show up as four spinning gold wheels and covered in all-seeing eyes.
While honeyed, Disney-adjacent motifs meander over gritty, unknown negative spaces, you feel as if you're hearing field recordings pulled from a non-physical plane, or some compendium of all universal events. Each track emits a blindingly bright yet hypnotically uncanny aura, as sonic events shimmer from one to the next, fading like mirages in the desert.
Her collaging style is on full display here, like at the end of "storm," where the muslin-like layers of her voice, spectral pads and minimal orchestration create a colossal, otherworldly space that stuns the listener into abstraction. Nothing assumes a definite form on touched by an angel. The flickers of brass on "200 bill" sound like hyena yelps while finicky, clattering percussion evoke bones being used as drumsticks. It's a dizzying tapestry that eventually gives way to an enchanting light. Broad, weightless chords glimmer in the distance as the brass section gains confidence, breaking free from the preceding darkness.
There are flashes of chaos that would be ideal to soundtrack the moment in an arthouse film where a character realises the true scale of their predicament. Back to back on the tracklist, "black timbs" and "the world is yours ensemble" form a musical house of mirrors as janky, frenetic keys disperse every which way. The improvised piano piece "another day in the sun" is the most grounded moment on the album. It doesn't opt for the cliched glorification of a summer's day. Instead, via clumsy, rumbling chords, it feels more like a famished and hopeless crawl towards some elusive patch of shade. "
"no weapon shall form against me" takes lush, airy pads and then crushes them into windy, overdriven walls of static—the longer it's sustained, the more a repeated ululation begins to resemble blood-curdling cries. By the end of its demanding 93-minute runtime, touched by an angel has explored both the eerie and the reverie inside childhood memories, possessing a beautiful fragility that makes it all feel like the slightest impact could shatter it into a million pieces. It's complex, epic and somehow still direct. Klein's playful exclamation in the same Gal-dem interview, "Hans Zimmer, your time is up bruv!," continues to age fantastically.
Tracklist01. black famous
02. DJ drop
03. black timbs
04. the world is yours ensemble
05. storm
06. don't flop TV
07. 200 bill feat. Matana Roberts & Khush
08. say black power and mean it
09. bunk
10. another day in the sun
11. street cred
12. daughter, brother and friend
13. no weapon shall form against me
14. big dreams inc.