Review: Alessi's Ark - Time Travel

 Artist: Alessi's Ark
Title: Time Travel
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Bella Union
Genre: Folk with some bluesy touches
Rating: 79 / 100

Yesterday, while reviewing the new Blut Aus Nord, I promised I would review the new Alessi's Ark LP: Time Travel. Those who have read this blog more often might have noticed an earlier entry in which I praised Alessi Laurent-Marke's project for creating such beautiful, introvert, cute contemporary folk music. This being said, I fortunately don't need to introduce her any further, these 4 words perfectly explain her way of creating folk music in my opinion.

The thing which grabbed my attention in the first place and made me adore Alessi's Ark so much, were her absolutely adorable vocals. She has this very soft, relatively low pitched voice, often vibrating in the more quiet parts. It is something that makes her able to really stand out from the major part of contemporary folk artist bumping out of the ground everywhere you look nowadays. Now this was my experience with her music when I first heard her debut album Notes From The Treehouse, this album already made clear she is not just a regular folk artist. Most of the songs (except for Woman and Magic Weather) contained a more "standard" pop/rock type of instrumentation, including 4/4 drum patterns, electric and bass guitar, adding a little country touch to the music. Not being a huge fan of country music, I was a bit afraid she would explore this genre more on Time Travel, fortunately, she didn't. There's still the same kind of intrumentation, but the overall rythm and guitar melodies tend to be a bit more bluesy, giving this album the kind of touch one might recognize from artists like Lay Low. This lovely bluesy touch is, in my opinion, something that fits really well to the soft folky sound Alessi is so used to, and actually adds quite a lot to the music.

Now, Notes From The Threehouse already wasn't really an epic record, containing 10 songs, with a total length of just 30 minutes, Time Travel is even shorter (28 minutes) with 4 songs not even reaching the 2 minute mark. This doesn't necessarily mean a decrease in musical quility, but I have to say, in Alessi's Ark's case, I really prefer her more lengthy songs, like, for example Hummingbird, from her debut album. She clearly has the ability to build astonishing songs with great respect to the dynamic aspect of music, unfortunately this was something I missed a bit on Time Travel, giving it the appearance of something that could have been released as an EP.

Alessi's Ark didn't fail to pleasure me with her sequel to Notes From The Treehouse, there are only these tiny point of discussion which doesn't make this album really top their previous, it just lacks that tiny amount of quality to deliver another pearl like Woman or Hummingbird. Despite these tiny points of criticism, I still adore Alessi's voice and would also still consider Time Travel as one of the better folk releases of 2011, it's just too good to be criticised too much.That's why it deserves 79/100 (it used to be 78, but I gave it one extra for the lovely cover artwork).

Spread the love, it's raining again,

Selwin.