Good Days, by Lenka
Lenka Kripac, usually known as Lenka, is a pop singer and songwriter. Those titles seem to form her entire professional identity; she runs no apparent side hustles like clothing lines or perfumes. Perhaps that’s why she sounds as though she’s invested her full self in her music.
On her seventh album, Good Days, the native Australian is a classicist: with the thoughtful supervision of producer Tony Buchen, she delves into soul and girl-group pop style from the 1960s and 1970s, eschewing electronics (and electronica) and setting her voice inside delicately formed layers of instrumentation closer to Motown than to Stax.
With her deceptively light voice, Lenka adds subtle hints of Petula Clark, Marianne Faithful, and Lulu—all UK singers who notched huge hits like, respectively, 1964’s “Downtown,” 1965’s “Come and Stay with Me,” and 1967’s “To Sir with Love” even as they navigated then-regnant chauvinism and condescension.
Lenka very slyly plays into a “dolly bird” image on the opening track, “Sunshine Girl.” While a horn trio beams warm yellow rays across a blue sky given pastel prettiness by glockenspiel, she slides from bicycle rides and freshly picked flowers to “toxic positivity” and “sunny lies” without changing her tone at all.
She exhibits her intelligence with feathery touches: amid the ABBA-run discotheque of “Archetypal,” she measures herself against wild gods and goddesses; moving to the doo-wop and girl-group rhythms of “They Never Said,” she imparts the things no one told her about love; and within the Carpenters-lite lushness of “Silver Linings,” she croons her way toward hope.
Good Days reaches its ending at “The Balance,” a simultaneously Mod groove and postmodern shuffle mingling sardonically playful flute with an airy recital of “a list of words,” including “empathy” and “climate change.” As a pop artiste, Lenka provides no answers—just a soundtrack to comfort us as we ponder all our questions.
|
|
