Album review: Neneh Cherry – Blank Project

Neneh Cherry releases a sonically adventurous album fusing electronic beats and avant-jazz noises

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Blank Project Neneh Cherry

(Small-town Supersound) **** ⋆⋆⋆⋆

Back after 18 years of semi-retirement, Neneh Cherry releases a sonically adventurous album fusing electronic beats and avant-jazz noises. Recorded in just five days with the acclaimed left-field techno producer Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, these raw and semi-improvised tracks may surprise fans of the Swedish singer's slick dance-pop hits from the 1980s and 1990. Dig deeper, though, and you realise it fits the broader sweep of her career, recalling her youthful work with spiky punk-funk collective Rip Rig & Panic and her 2011 collaboration with the Scandinavian free-jazzers The Thing. On mournful trip-hop ballads such as Across the Water and Spit Three Times, Cherry muses on love, motherhood and mortality over skeletal beats and minimal keyboards. Cynical and Everything are more upbeat, the latter morphing from a lively staccato electro-rap into choking, gurgling, abstract vocals. Emphasising propulsive rhythms and experimental sounds over conventional melodies and song structures, Blank Project is unlikely to revive Cherry's pop-star career, but it is a bold and strikingly contemporary comeback.