Review: Kelly Lee Owens Delivers a Collection of Stunning Electro Pop With New Album Inner Song
- by Joe Sharratt
- in Reviews
Welsh electronic musician and producer Kelly Lee Owens took an unusual step with the release of Inner Song, her second album and the follow up to 2017’s self-titled debut album which received widespread critical acclaim. With the Coronavirus pandemic looming large over us all, she chose to delay the release of her new album as a gesture of solidarity with record stores that had been forced to shut their doors.
Owens worked in record stores in London herself after leaving her job as a nurse in Manchester and relocating to the capital to pursue a career in music. After plugging away with a band, she decided to change direction, left the group behind, and began experimenting with electro sounds, culminating in her wonderful debut LP.
Curiously, Inner Song opens with a Radiohead cover: Arpeggi is a delicious and other worldly instrumental reimagining of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi from the Oxfordshire band’s 2007 album In Rainbows. Owens takes the original’s looping riffs and compresses them, creating a surreal but wonderful intro to the album that draws you in.
On continues that dreamy theme, before exploding into a pulsating floor-filler, albeit one that captures the pain and the optimism of the end of a relationship and the new possibilities its demise yields, while Melt! sees Owens produce an out and out techno monster.
Jeanette is a tribute to her nana, who sadly passed away last year and was a big supporter of Owens’ music. It’s a beautiful homage, a soaring panorama of a track that is perhaps the album’s high point. The incredible Corner Of My Sky, a near eight-minute fusion of spoken-word poetry and haunting beats featuring fellow Welsh musician and former Velvet Undergroud star John Cale, offers some strong competition to the claim though, with its slow-build tension and lyrics that embody their shared homeland.
Inner Song though is a remarkable body of work through, by various turns low-key and beautifully heartfelt and also surging and high-octane. Owens deserves huge credit for cramming so much into one album, and doing it all so well.
Watch the official video for Melt! here.
Inner Song tracklist:
1. Arpeggi
2. On
3. Melt!
4. Re-Wild
5. Jeanette
6. L.I.N.E.
7. Corner Of My Sky (feautring John Cale)
8. Night
9. Flow
10. Wake-Up
electro-pop
