True artistry is rare.
What we often hear from musical performers, instead, is a combination of discipline and workmanlike self-expression. Formula, as well. True artistry, however, manifests itself as the ability to work within recognizable forms while finding otherwise unseen or unheard variations within the expected where the musical artist’s genuine vision and personality emerge.
Anjali Ray fits that particular bill. Her new EP Dark Side is a glowing addition to her growing oeuvre that doesn’t smack of a retread but, instead, points to the Indian-origin singer/songwriter’s continued growth. She refines her gifts with each new set, as well, cleaving away what is unnecessary, and underscoring her strengths.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/anjaliraymusic/
“Leave Everyone Behind” is a stellar first song. It sets the bar high for everything that follows. Many listeners will be taken in by its restless shifts of pace and tempo as well as the potent marriage of its bass and drums. There are several discreet instrumental touches worked into the arrangement and the inexorably unique march feel she utilizes helps make this already strong opener even more undeniable.
The blending of acoustic guitar and keyboards that provides the musical scaffolding for “California” is an ideal setting for Ray’s voice. Her vocals are searching, full of yearning, and always fearless. She knows what she wants to say and how to say it. It’s artistry, once again, to hear a performer who never puts a foot wrong and writes with such unfettered clarity as she does here – and elsewhere. The drumming reaches one of the EP’s high points thanks to its performance during “Apple of My Eye”. She takes this well-worn and ultra-familiar phrase as her own and builds an outstanding track around it that never smacks of cliché. That’s no small thing.
Strong bass and synthesizer lines surge from your speakers during the second to last track “Tesla”. She writes from a highly personal point of view without ever risking obscurity and the art of making the personal universal is another feather in her songwriting cap. It’s equally thrilling to chart the trajectory of her voice throughout this performance. She moves with confidence and skill from highs to lows without ever once losing the plot along the way.
She kicks out the jams a bit with the closer. “Middle of the Night” finds Ray at her darkest moment, literally, yet there’s an ultimately redemptive quality about this track that even the most cynical cannot deny. The fact that the song exists is all the affirmation listeners need that, in the end, she’s emerging triumphant from whatever ails her.
There is no such thing as a sad song. A sad song is silence. Anjali Ray is far from silent, she endures, and Dark Side supplies us with a record of that ongoing endurance in the face of life’s slings and arrows. We’re better off for it.
Her artistry will remain with us for years to come, and you’ll finish this EP with utter confidence that her best work remains in the future. This, however, will do for now.
Chadwick Easton