Vagabon - Sorry I Haven't Called (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

The multi-instrumentalist Laetitia Tamko, prone to playing and singing everything herself, has moved in a more rhythmic danceable direction since her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds. "I didn't feel like being introspective. I just wanted to have fun," she has said about her new album, but the opening track begs to differ. Switched on by layers of synths, cymbal sounds and jots of electronic percussion, "Can I Talk My Shit?," a collaboration with producer Jack McLaine and Trayer Tryon, spends its length letting us know Tamko wants to talk troubles while also filling the dance floor: "I'm way too high for this/ Riding on a wave too low/ Never found myself through the smoke." As a result, she's also more intimately conversational.

On the smooth house dance track, "You Know How," in which she breaks into French in several verses, the Cameroon native who now lives in New York City weaves through a complex emotional equation: "So come a little closer/ We should leave together/ I think we're more than friends/ But maybe just when we're alone." In "Carpenter" she pleads for a second chance in a relationship in which the timing wasn't right and yet doubts creep in ("I'm not afraid of what everybody wants/ You're what everybody wants, but I'm not what you would want"). A strumming guitar background is the setting for the light-hearted dance track, "Lexicon," which has the flavor of Sade, as she revels in the physical side of a relationship which has gone beyond language. Guitars are also strummed in "Anti-Fuck," which washes into indie guitar rock and where again love relationships are pondered: "Am I wrong to decide the last thing I want is unknown/ Am I wrong to reply, 'The last thing I felt was alone'/ Am I wrong to decide the last thing I want, is war for us?"

The album's title was influenced by Tamko's decision to go silent and move to rural Germany to write and record with assistance from Tryon, McLaine, Rostam Batmanglij and others. While the sound has the compression needed to fill clubs, there are still some dynamics present to clear the way to work out relationship battles by the dance floor.

TRACKLIST

1. Vagabon - Can I Talk My Shit?
2. Vagabon - Carpenter
3. Vagabon - You Know How
4. Vagabon - Lexicon
5. Vagabon - Passing Me By
6. Vagabon - Autobahn
7. Vagabon - Nothing to Lose
8. Vagabon - It's a Crisis
9. Vagabon - Do Your Worst
10. Vagabon - Interlude
11. Vagabon - Made Out with Your Best Friend
12. Vagabon - Anti-Fuck



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