Originals sung with feeling. I believe in Chantal Acda’s voice at an instinctive level. And once again from this most convincing of singers, Safer Places locates the ring of authenticity. While there are other musicians here and the songs are co-written by Dutch singer Acda and Italian pianist Bruno Bavota (they worked together on a poignant album called A Closer Distance issued in 2022) it’s the voice that is the main event. A little gravelly, heartfelt, quite stark in places, poetic, real. Very strong on being vulnerable, in other words not pretending.
And what do the songs say? Usually they are slow and sad but not at all depressing. The title track ‘Safer Places’ you could easily imagine jazz musicians improvising around in another setting. It’s elegiac, haunting and begins with a beautiful chord. Take us to safer places, no traces is the refrain. You do get a feeling of the protagonist wanting to escape an everlasting sense of ennui.
The thoughts are like fragments. And these shards sting like nettles at times. Bavota is Ludovico Einaudi-like in his accompaniment on ‘Left on Brakes’. It’s almost obligatory to stop at this point and reacquaint oneself with ‘I Giorni’. So I did. Bavota contributes a lot here, elsewhere he is more unobtrusive. The songs often reveal themselves late – here the paradoxical observation “then she told him look out for the day that I am freer waiting for us to stay” is the key passage.
That’s quite lovely. A spoken word monologue opens song of resilience keep on going song with the clunky title ‘Sandwich in Mouth’ a little talk about the difficulties of being taken for granted as a mother before the poignant melody that has dubbed in backing vocals.
In places all this makes me think of some of the more unclassifiable pop I used to hear growing up in the 1980s often scoffed at by the more rock and post-punk inclined critics of the NME, maybe touches of Kate Bush here and there more in terms of sensibility only because Acda’s voice is nothing like the same. However, I skipped a few tracks after a few tries as ‘Don’t Know What To Say’, ‘Real’ even with the nice bit of synth darting about at the outset and ‘This Damn Wall’ didn’t appeal to me as much. But everything else does. And ‘Bikes’ at the end is beautiful, the acoustic guitar working well against the voice and even euphonium (played by Niels van Heertum) later after the piano lines adds tonal colour and a new seam. I’d love to see Acda live – maybe one day.
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