Skip to main content

Niki King – The Everlasting Energy of Love (Soul Route)

Four stars

 

Niki King sports flowing white robes offset against a starlit sky in publicity shots for the Edinburgh sired singer’s sixth album. If this image suggests some kind of celestial awakening, the record’s title too hints of personal and spiritual transcendence across a self produced set of songs of strength and heartbreak.

 

Set to a lush backdrop provided by a band with roots in Edinburgh’s criminally unsung after-hours jazz-soul scenes that King emerged from in the 1990s, the album’s twelve cuts show off the light and shade of love, life and everything that goes with it. This makes for an eminently grown up collection that is by turns reflective, mournful and redemptive.

 

The opening ‘Soul Route’ is a horn-led statement of intent featuring a core of keyboardist Steven Christie, guitarist Aki Remally, double bassist Paul Gilbody and drummer Stuart Brown. ‘Dreamer’ charts the travails of attempting to navigate around a fickle music business in a song that becomes an anthem for persistence on a par with Sade’s ‘When Am I Going to Make a Living.’

 

All this is wrapped up by a string quartet arranged by Pete Harvey, harps and a horn section. At the record’s heart, however, is King’s voice, which remains rich, impassioned, determined and defiant.

 

King may be launching the record at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall this month, but it sounds sired in the late night melting pot of Henry’s Jazz Cellar where she cut her performing teeth. This new opus sits too alongside the recent stream of releases by King’s Edinburgh contemporary and kindred spirit Joseph Malik.

 

If The Everlasting Energy of Love came out of Memphis or Detroit, it would be rightly hailed as a cosmic masterpiece and garner global acclaim. Close your eyes as you sink into its riches, and make it so.

 

The Everlasting Energy of Love is released on Soul Route Records on 10thFebruary. Niki King plays the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh the same night.


The List, February 2024

 

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more