MICHAEL KIWANUKA
SMALL CHANGES
POLYDOR/UNIVERSAL MUSIC
Michael Kiwanuka is an essential voice, a testament to the potential and referential depth of neo-soul. It is. Rooted in the past with a finger on the pulse of our contemporary conflicts and disillusionment. And it isn’t.
His 2016 record Love & Hate elevated the British singer-songwriter’s North American status. He appealed to nostalgists and indie and alternative fans alike, and yet he’d already experienced UK fame, winning awards and awkwardly mingling among celebs that saw him as a Black Moses for the new millennia.
Love & Hate appealed broadly because Kiwanuka went searching for something at a moment when everyone felt lost. The 10-min opening volley, “Cold Little Heart,” channeled Isaac Hayes’ charged orchestrations and borrowed a guitar riff from 70s psychedelia. It became the theme to the popular TV series Big Little Lies, expanding Kiwanuka’s audience into a very white, very mainstream, very binge-America. The entire Love & Hate record trails in its wake, big and layered, and utterly moving despite its more populist ambition. If it had a fault it was that producers Danger Mouse and Inflo undersold Kiwanuka’s greatest asset, his voice (but also his Voice as an artist of crossover appeal), which felt intermittently diminished among the album’s excess. 2019’s eponymous Kiwanuka stripped away a few layers and appealed to an artificial modernity that distrusts unabashed sincerity. The Grammy- and Brit-nominated album went on to win the Mercury Prize; balanced achieved, chords adequately struck.
On his latest, Small Changes, Kiwanuka divests of the full choirs and bombast and shiny electronic veneer. Isaac Hayes, Quincy Jones and Otis have taken a spectral seat at a discreet table at the back of a smoky nightclub. After the depletion of the headliner’s crowd, Michael Kiwanuka steps up to the stage to fill a void, to play through the coming darkness. He’s not asking for time or attention; he’s taking in the moment and sharing a piece of himself to whomever might still be listening. Eight years gone, lesser are the expectations for an artist now obscured by his own shadow.
The album’s opener, “Floating Parade”, sets the synth and bassline to a pulse, a downtempo rhythm that elevates simplicity and stubbornly resists the push to do more than is necessary to achieve stasis.
“Small Changes” best displays the production shift away from the enhancements that distracted from Kiwanuka’s raw magnetism. A smooth guitar solo and AM-radio keys backdrop the artist’s taffeta songsmithing. That’s not to suggest that he’s abandoned the 1970s psychedelia influence that bedazzled his neo-soul. The guitar on “Low Down Part 1” and “Part 2” could have been a Pink Floyd sample, also paced and deliberately appointed. The twin cuts also celebrate Kiwanuka’s affection for Beth Gibbons with a Portishead-ian dabble into acid jazz adjacency.
Like the best of prescription narcotics, Small Changes comes with its share of small-print side effects, namely that the album lacks the highs of its predecessors by harnessing mood and downbeats of third-whisky regrets. “Elite low-key mood-maker” isn’t meant to be a thoroughly backhanded compliment; some albums thrive as conversation starters and statements of high-functioning music IQs.
As an exercise in close-listening, Small Changes requires much of the audience, perhaps too much for a disengaged ear to appreciate. Disentanglement from the Now demands a quiet, receptive mind, a state that Kiwanuka rewards with a subtle and resonant album that aimed not to steal the limelight but to transcend time and overlap eras. The main attraction is and always has been subject to the fickle tastemakers that churn through the future without regard to the affinities of the past. With too little of the old roustabout, however, the rest of us are also at risk of falling asleep with the drunks at the end of the bar, taking the “less-is-more” methodology to the point of diminishing return.
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