Bedouine - Birdsongs Of A Killjoy

Bird is the word.  Bedouine (aka Azniv Korkejian) returns with a follow-up album to 2017’s self-titled breath of fresh air.  If you enjoyed her debut, Bird Songs Of A Killjoy is essentially more of the same and that’s a good thing.  With many of the songs here being written along with the prior batch, it hardly seems a collection of leftovers.  If there is any stylistic distinction at all, the hint of a country accent on the album’s predecessor is given over more fully to a seventies soft rock sound.

Lest the fear of the MOR heyday of warm winds blowing keep you away, Korkejian’s crystalline vocals are the perfect fit for the pillowy plushness of the arrangements.  The album starts with a clutch of robin’s egg blue charmers.  Whatever hint of loneliness there might be in these songs is swept away by Korkejian’s carefree treatment of them.  The starting sampler operates in a narrow range from the soft-headed ‘Sunshine Sometimes’ to the gentle tip-toed push of ‘One More Time’, but all are worthwhile. 

Killjoy would make for a perfectly pleasant listen if it continued in the same vein of its opening tracks.  What you might not see coming on silent wings is the pulsing heart of the central suite of songs.  Starting with the jazz-inflected ‘Dizzy’ the album evolves into a bird of a different color.  The song starts off innocently enough, but Korkejian ably bounds along as the song bursts forth in rolling drums, moody bass, and buzzy guitars.  Though the song is primarily instrumental and gives way to the swoon its title implies, it serves to wash away the cabernet haze that comes before it.

From here, the two most unadorned songs with Korkejian’s clearest eyed vocals and lyrics emerge.  Working primarily as the duo they started as, she and her producer Guy Seyffert are enveloped in the Spacebomb swell of strings and woodwinds on ‘Bird’, but the song retains its simple acoustic core.  When Korkejian intones “I kept the bottle we drank from together” over a finger-picked guitar things go next level.  Like a sparrow that alights in different corners of an open-air room, it’s hard to pin down if she is singing of herself, family, or a lover.  But no matter it is a stunning song and arrangement.  Somehow she takes things even further with the following ‘Bird Gone Wild’.  Filled with autobiographical allusions, her vocals take on the weightlessness of Eva Cassidy’s at their most delicate - weaving up, over, and under tying off colorful silk bows in each of the choruses.  As gentle of an undoing you are likely to ever encounter, the heartfelt revelation of the song comes through loud and clear.

Though the following ‘Hummingbird’ serves as a glide path back to earth, the balance of the album holds more highlights.  The woozy lounger ‘Matters of the Heart’ with its slippy organ and light percussion makes for one of the best retro-sounding tracks.  While the lovely sing-song cadence of ‘Echo Park’ makes it impossible not to reference Joni Mitchell, it also makes for a perfectly summery song.  A song for the days where the greatest concern is, as Korkejian puts it, “the rising cost of coffee”.  The smoky smudge of ‘Tall Man’ makes for a perfect closer and maybe even hints at a bird’s surrender.

Birdsongs Of A Killjoy perfectly channels a decades-old sound, but Korkejian’s seemingly effortless vocals and guitar work keep it from being solely an exercise in nostalgia.  The grouping of avian-themed songs at its core are of a rarefied air seldom found in today’s clamor of big songs.  Given the chance of an audience, Killjoy and its predecessor are the types of records, like Sade’s debut and Amy Winehouse’s breakthrough, that have old geezers dusting off and setting up their stereo equipment and extolling the long-forgotten virtues of music to anyone who will listen.  Word.