Bedouine - Neon Summer Skin Review
Soulful and intense, this record is an exploration of memory and a masterful rethinking of the folk rock soundscape.
Azniv Korkejian, the artist behind the moniker Bedouine, got the idea for what was to become her third studio album during a trip to Saudi Arabia to see her parents. As they were about to move to Armenia for their retirement, it dawned on her that this would likely be the last time she would visit the country, which to her was intrinsically tied to her childhood. The album which resulted from this realisation is at the same time unpacking, reflection, and revisiting of the many interwoven, complicated threads coming together to create this complex tapestry of memory, nostalgia, yearning, and at the bottom of it all identity; but it goes further than that. The past intersects in turn with the present - with the pain and the frustration of seeing those familiar places, so profoundly identitarian and so tied to the glow of childhood memory, threatened and torn apart by war - and then with an even deeper past, that of a family which has moved in time through Armenia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Thus the driving force of the record ends up being in equal parts the gentler headspace of the recollection of growing up, and the more intricate, deeper cut of a storytelling that has something of the family epic. It’s not quite Garcìa Marquez in music, but it does have something of A Hundred Years of Solitude to it, the same vaguely hallucinatory, broad quality that evokes images of the rippling air in the heat of high noon; the same near-obsessive fascination with the vagaries of remembering.
Folk rock is an excellent tool for embarking on a mission like this. Korkejian has a splendid sensitivity for the genre, which she approaches from an angle slightly unusual, coloured in this record with a deeper streak of pop than emerged from her previous works. She has, most of all, a truly remarkable voice, both smooth and powerful, controlled in a way that does not sacrifice expressiveness. It has something of Karen Carpenter to it, and perhaps something also of Janis Joplin, especially in the parts where the interplay between voice and guitar becomes tighter. Those, naturally, are the tools of a storytelling-through-music, and this album is storytelling first and foremost: there are many touches indicating that (the spoken intro to “Canopies”, for instance, is one, and so is the slow sprawl of the song itself, which strings a series vignettes like beads on a thread). The pacing of the whole record is also that of both storytelling and recollection: slow, steady, occasionally meandering, an enforced stop from the breakneck rhythm of modern living. Memories, and childhood memories especially, are by their own nature bright and dilated. The songs in this album feel the same: they have plenty of breadth and a brightness and warmth that are a perfect match for the record’s title.
Guitar melodies have been the backbone of Bedouine’s music in previous outings, and so they are here, too, but there is a greater interest now to play more extensively with other elements. Piano plays a significant part - an instrument Korkejian recalls being introduced to because her mother was determined she study it - emerging first in a ripple in opening track “On My Own” and pushing to front of stage through the final, piano solo reprise of “Canopies” that closes the record. The use of brass brings an almost jazzy quality to “One Thing Right” and especially to album namesake “Neon Summer Skin”, two tracks placed one after the other at the heart of the record which inject a burst of energy before the slower dip of the recorder conversation between Korkejian and her mother.
Partly pop, partly folk, wholly ambitious, this is a record that seeks to portray more than to explain: to provide an almost visual representation of a feeling. It feels, in places, like a collection of photos from a family album, some faded, some bright and vivid.