Basia's Palace
With a Basia Bulat album, you know exactly what you’re going to get, but you’re never really sure of how you’re going to get it. Once the autoharp-plucking folk phenom of the mid-2000s Montreal indie explosion, Bulat has since applied her heartfelt songcraft to ’60s girl-group gold sounds (2016’s *Good Advice*) and string-quartet reimaginations (2022’s *The Garden*), but her stylistic explorations are always anchored by a radiant voice that projects equal amounts of strength and sensitivity. Her seventh album was largely born from solo songwriting sessions and MIDI experiments conducted in her apartment in the dead of night and embraces the sort of free-spirited approach that results when you’re liberated from the demands of the waking world. With the opening duo of “My Angel” and “Baby,” Bulat takes a shot of “Espresso” and embraces her inner disco diva, while the song that actually references “disco” in its title—”Disco Polo”—is a loving tribute to the namesake dance/folk hybrid popular in her ancestral homeland of Poland. But the exquisite string arrangements—courtesy of Dua Lipa collaborator Drew Jurecka—serve as the connective tissue between the album’s mirror-ball-twirling highs and its calming comedowns, like the elegant piano ballad “Right Now” and dreamy country odyssey “The Moon.”
Canadian singer's seventh album musters dreamy pop that simultaneously arrives and floats away. Album New Music review by Thomas H Green