Seinabo Sey, Pretend - album review: Pulsing strings and animated hand-drums

Download: Pretend; Poetic; Hard Time; Words

Appropriately, influences from both sides of the Gambian/Swedish singer Seinabo Sey’s heritage feed into this impressive debut album, an alliance most clearly achieved in the blend of pulsing strings and animated hand-drums of “Words”.

Sey has drawn comparison to Nina Simone for the passionate engagement of her singing on “Pretend” and the single “Younger”, which doesn’t need the quirkily treated title-hook. It injects a note of the synthetic into what ought to be more organically emotional: by comparison Benjamin Clementine, likewise compared to the High Priestess of Soul, more closely approximates the sense of genuine jeopardy in Simone’s delivery.

There’s a Gabrielle-style vibrato tremble to Sey’s voice on the warm “Poetic” and hypnotically anthemic “Hard Time”, while producer Magnus Lidehäll finds myriad means, from trip-hop beats to gospel choir, to realise Pretend’s character of the raw and the cooked.