When a celebrated figure tries their hand at a new field only to prove a resounding success, do we simply throw up our hands and toast the latest multi-hyphenate or do we wonder – perhaps with a stench or residue of bitterness if the thought is expressed aloud – whether they might in fact have missed their true calling?
On his new album Essex Honey the talented composer and multi-instrumentalist Dev Hynes returns to his wistful and navel-gazing Blood Orange monicker for an album about collective griefs and the spectres of home. Much of the record is redolent whether stylistically or lyrically of standouts like ‘Charcoal Baby’ and ‘Dagenham Dream’ from the wonderful Negro Swan, now perhaps less funky and broadly experimental but a bit more soulful with a detour courtesy of Tariq Al-Sabir and the Durutti Column as Hynes gathers in the shape of Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Mustafa, Ian Isaiah, Tirzah, Charlotte Dos Santos, Brendan Yates and Mabe Fratti what is mostly an updated cast of friends.
Regressing back to childhood and standing on the brink of the abyss even as he fondly summons up both directly and indirectly snippets and melodies of old favourites like Elliott Smith, The Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian and Everything But The Girl, on Essex Honey his lyrics still waft like fragments or heady puffs of vapour, the wisps or remnants of a wider story which he spurns to express in full. There are countryside pastorals and painful departures, songs of sibling solace, reckonings amid the tumult of King’s Cross station and dark nights that flow into lows.
It is a sturdy and sensitive outing from Hynes some seven years on from his last full-length solo effort, a fertile period which has brought a couple of extended plays and seen him take further steps into the realm of classical music courtesy of a collaboration with Third Coast Percussion, while among a slew of collaborations he has become a prolific film and television composer writing the scores for Queen & Slim by Melina Matsoukas, We Are Who We Are by Luca Guadagnino, Mainstream in a reunion with Gia Coppola, Passing by Rebecca Hall and the Master Gardener by Paul Schrader. On Essex Honey there is even a bit of bal-musette accordion and a more fulsome use of his saxophone.
Still the album’s most thrilling moment comes from an unexpected source: the novelist Zadie Smith who has been one of our most prominent literary voices since her debut White Teeth was published in 2000 and picked up a string of awards. That novel with piquancy and comedy celebrated life in contemporary London while bearing witness to Britain’s complex twentieth-century history of immigration from the Commonwealth and Smith has continued to explore that milieu, sometimes reaching across the Atlantic or showing a curiosity for those on the margins of fame with her latest work The Fraud published in 2023.
Her singing voice flowers unfettered for just a few lines at the end of ‘Vivid Dreams’, a track which ironically discusses writer’s block among other themes and is carried along by propulsive drums, glimmering keys plus a few impish woodwinds. Hynes himself is no slouch in the vocal department, with a lovely plaintive tone that can readily embed or distantiate itself within the mix or else step forward with a hushed intimacy, and on ‘Vivid Dreams’ the writer-turned-songstress Smith mostly stays in the background singing a sleek and soulful accompaniment.
Then the deep bowing of a string and a burbling synth like an incipient spaceship open out onto a clearing where we find her voice in the wilderness, as she repeats the line ‘I don’t wanna be here alone’ the second time with added emphasis then utters ‘Oh, I wanna run away’ and ‘I think I might just stay’ now trailing off into a reflected distance. It’s a voice which seems to harness the best of eighties power ballads, neo soul or alternative R&B, reminiscent of everything from Janet Jackson during her Velvet Rope era to Dawn Richard on her recent collaborations with Spencer Zahn, at once luscious and sensual, certainly stunning and capable of stirring its own vivid dreams.
