'carbon' by Sirintip
The Thai-Swedish singer’s frame of reference on her sophomore album is humanity’s effect on climate. She doesn’t voice her study on the subject so much in lyrics. Instead, she implies her sense of conservatorship primarily through the music, with her words often as not elliptically referencing her primary topic.
The intrigue of carbon comes from figuring out what Sirintip is on about: what goes on in the clouds, among herself and other people, both? But her poetic enigmas might be less commanding were she not such a musical polymath. She fits that bill as a jazz singer, though she has a tenderly wounded way with a piano-accompanied torch ballad, too. More often, however, Sirintip is given to incorporating electronics—sometimes percussively wild as drum & bass, elsewhere with a house thump—the kind of alt R&B in which Angie Stone would be comfortable crooning, and Laurie Anderson-via-Phillip Glass systems music.
Occasionally she incorporates instrumentation from her Asian heritage, putting subtle emphasis on the global nature of the issues that fuel her artistry. Like a less rootsy, Norah Jones, what Sirintip achieves here could be at times heard as pop. In what bodes to be a good way, there's no telling what kind of footprint Sirintip will leave the wake of carbon.
