Esperanza Spalding - 12 Little Spells

180-gram gatefold double LP

No. 4 on New York Times' Best Albums of 2018 list!

Esperanza Spalding's enthusiasm for bundling her releases with attention-grabbing concepts — such as writing and recording an entire album in an uninterrupted 77-hour livestream, or dedicating each song on her new LP, 12 Little Spells, to a different body part — might make it seem like she's attempting to mask some shortcoming in the actual music. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Excellent prior efforts like 2017's Exposure and 2016's character-driven Emily's D+Evolution combined sturdy hooks and bold idiosyncrasy in a way that seemed comparable only to fellow genre-of-one artists like Joni Mitchell, Björk or Spalding's friend and collaborator Prince, writes Rolling Stone.

Spalding's new LP favors a slightly dreamier aesthetic (see the gorgeous, overture-like opener "12 Little Spells," dedicated to the thoracic spine). But there's still music here that will make your head spin with its exquisite intergenre oddity, like the prog-meets-pop-meets-spoken-word mini opus "The Longing Deep Down" (an "abdominal portal" ode on which she sings, "It's fucking hard to be longing/And at the same time feel your own belonging") or "Dancing the Animal," an ultra-mathy art-funk meditation on the era of the cloud written for the mind/brain.

As with Spalding's earlier albums, the conceptual hook of 12 Little Spells only hints at the radically inventive nature of the songs themselves.

 

1. 12 Little Spells

2. To Tide Us Over

3. Til the Next Full

4. Thang

5. Touch in Mine

6. The Longing Deep Down

7. 7 You Have to Dance

8. Now Know

9. All Limbs Are

10. Readying to Rise

11. Dancing the Animal

12. With Others

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