During his first decade as a recording artist, Michael Kiwanuka did so much to expand his musical parameters and upend expectations of what he ought to do and ought to be, that he most definitely earned the right to be a little more measured about his moves. In other words, smaller steps and gestures can reap as many dividends as the grander ones.
During his first decade as a recording artist, Michael Kiwanuka did so much to expand his musical parameters and upend expectations of what he ought to do and ought to be, that he most definitely earned the right to be a little more measured about his moves. In other words, smaller steps and gestures can reap as many dividends as the grander ones.
That’s not to suggest the man’s ambitions have grown too modest or that the songs on his fourth album are any less rich, moving and inventive. Yet Small Changes is clearly the work of an artist who finds himself at a different stage in his life, looking at his work with a keener focus. Whereas the album’s celebrated predecessors – 2016’s Love & Hate and his 2019 Mercury Music Prize winner Kiwanuka – each brandished a sense of boldness and scope that could almost feel overwhelming, Small Changes is defined more by its nuances. As befits its title, it’s more about the necessary increments, about the careful honing of ideas and emotions in hopes of capturing an essence before it has the chance to dissipate into the ether.
Thankfully, some results still achieve a remarkable degree of scale and fullness. With their abundance of strings and choral-style vocal harmonies, new songs like “Follow Your Dreams” are satisfyingly steeped in both the psych-pop swirl of Kiwanuka’s “Living In Denial” and the spiritual-jazz sumptuousness of “Hard To Say Goodbye”. Yet more characteristic is the haunting “Rebel Soul”, a song full of fear and yearning built around an insistent, cyclical piano figure, and “The Rest Of Me”, an endearingly sincere expression of gratitude and loyalty whose creamy yet crystalline ’70s soul sound evokes Shuggie Otis at his sunniest. Here and elsewhere, there’s a palpable shift away from the more maximalist approach that often predominated in the past, as single elements come more starkly to the fore, like the guitar solo he uses to pierce the melancholy haze of Small Changes’ title track.
The music’s more intimate scale, gentler pace and prevailing warmth all reflect some not-so-small changes in Kiwanuka’s personal life, including fatherhood and a pre-pandemic move from London to Southampton. What with the considerable demands of new parenthood, it’s understandable the songs here – many of which boast a more hopeful attitude toward matters of love and connection than what’s largely come before – developed gradually over several years before he reunited with producers Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and Inflo in London, Los Angeles and Burton’s studio in Connecticut. Kiwanuka and Inflo perform the majority of the music on the album, which also features appearances by guests as The Time keyboardist turned Janet Jackson producer Jimmy Jam, D’Angelo bassist Pino Palladino and former Bill Withers sideman James Gadson on drums.
The singer discovered a new lodestone when Burton introduced him to No Other, Gene Clark’s 1974 masterpiece of gorgeously forlorn folk-rock. The album’s influence is palpable in Small Changes’ use of strings, which may sometimes add a quality of opulence but more often serve a more supportive role. Along with Sade’s Diamond Life – a childhood favourite of Kiwanuka’s that became another reference point during Small Changes’ creation – the Clark inspiration fed his drive to reduce the songs down to their most essential components. As he recently told Uncut, “Everything was getting stripped away and built back up again.”
Perhaps as a result, even the seemingly airiest songs on Small Changes brandish a surprising muscularity. In the opening “Floating Parade”, that quality’s provided by a sinuous yet adamant groove like the kind that powered so many of Curtis Mayfield’s greatest songs. Similarly, the stinging solo in “Small Changes” – stunning proof of just how much Kiwanuka has adapted the languid vocabulary of his guitar hero David Gilmour to his own purposes – emerges from the sturdy scaffolding created by Inflo’s plaintive keys and syncopated drum beat and the church-choir vocal arrangement. Kiwanuka’s languid wisps of guitar, the pillowy strings and a lovers-rock rhythm all give shimmer and form to “Live For Your Love”, one of several songs that express a deep gratitude for love amid other feelings of unworthiness and pain (“You saw the warning signs/And didn’t pay no mind”).
The emphasis on concision – which Kiwanuka describes as a newfound drive “to get to the point and shave off the fat” – inevitably means less room for the grander stylistic flourishes that distinguish Kiwanuka’s centrepiece “Hard To Say Goodbye” or further elevate the most ecstatic sequences of his live sets. But any worries that Kiwanuka’s grown cautious about pursuing more adventurous avenues will disappear upon contact with the two-part “Lowdown”, a wholly successful effort to combine the sun-kissed languor of the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, the scrappier energy of Lagos’ Ofege and the psych-baroque splendour of David Axelrod. The heady space-funk finale for “The Rest Of Me” opens up another tantalizing new pathway, too.
Either way, whatever reductions Kinawuka and his producers may have made in regards to the music’s breadth, the songs on Small Changes more than compensate for that when it comes to depth. Nor is there anything small about the emotions they contain or the pleasures they evoke.
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