Alexa Borden - Flares
Artist: Alexa Borden
Album: Flares
Out Now
Rating: 5/5
Alexa Borden doesn’t seem to want time get the better of her, with the Canadian singer releasing her second album by the time she can even order the celebratory champagne. With Flares, she’s shown a lyrical and musical ability far beyond her tender years.
‘Flare’s is an album that could quite easily come in inhaler form, gratifyingly woozy and ethereal, never feeling solid enough to ever tie down into the grounds of normality, although still not quite as unconstrained by Earth logic as Grime’s latest for example.
Borden’s pure and angelic vocal is the album’s guiding light, helping it along when the dreamlike music perhaps gets a little too much. This is shown better than anywhere else than in ‘I Just Want To Be Near You’, a succulent and sweet little song that could easily double as a knitted jumper it has such a warming ability.
Borden’s also clear in showing that she’s willing to take a risk, unusually using an organ at the beginning of the aforementioned track and putting not just one, but two purely instrumental tracks in to the mix, one a harp driven interlude slap bang in the middle of the album and the other a quiet closer to end proceedings.
‘Flares’ is clearly a personal passion project, with Borden having also produced the entire album in her bedroom (something she told us about in our exclusive Alexa Borden interview) and the record having a wonderfully focussed and single minded feeling to it. This wasn’t an album altered by focus groups.
Only for fleeting seconds does this feel like bedroom alchemy, and only then it’s when you really crank the volume up to levels the record gets a little uncomfortable with. If you keep the noise to a healthy level though, Flares is an album feeling just as complex and layered a production as many a studio production could ever want to be.
The second half of the album might not be as be quite as genre-bouncing as it the first salvo of tracks, but trade in variety for power, with ‘Give Up The Ship’ fantastically moody and ‘Don’t You Feel Bad?’ an intimate and agonisingly desperate plea for apology.
Flares’ is an excellent sophomore effort from an artist still clearly experimenting. When she finally discovers her natural sound, we can’t wait to hear what wonders she unearths.
‘Flares’ is out now and make sure to check out our exclusive Alexa Borden interview.