Weirdo

...e Wonder-like keyboard wizardry tucked into the mix, was the first song Emma-Jean Thackray started writing for her second album as she was finishing Yellow, her 2021 debut. She absorbs the insult and more ("Why you always got to be so different? You don't belong") and embraces it, in turn sending out a positive beacon for listeners who have also been dealt such abuse. Thackray continued writing with the intent to have the album represent her acceptance of neurodivergence and mental health struggles in general, but the death of her longstanding partner in 2023 necessitated the processing of grief as well. Thackray said that the making of Weirdo saved her life, and she did it in near total solitude at her flat. Reggie Watts adds a down-and-out vocal to "Black Hole," a toast to depression with appropriately taut and cyclic funk rhythms. Kassa Overall offers calm rhymes of affirmation on the gently swinging "It's Okay," one of few songs on which Thackray plays trumpet, her primary instrument. Apart from those two voices, Weirdo is the work of a one-woman band; additionally, Thackray handles the engineering, production, and mixing. Compared to Yellow, this is more of an R&B record, if still with shades of fusion and jazz-funk, and new hints of certain '90s alt-rock touchstones. There's less instrumental flash, churning guitars fill space far more often than brass, and Thackray lays her soul bare all the way through. Weirdo pinballs from one emotion to another and thrives on contrast, most obviously so in a sequence that moves from the fiery "Stay" and Black Radio-evoking "Let Me Sleep" to the Baduizm of "Please Leave Me Alone" ("How'd you get this number?!") and the inhibition-shedding gospel of "Save Me." No matter the self-doubt, hopelessness, sleeplessness, and other debilitating issues Thackray sings about, her music brims with life and c'est la vie humor. Take "Wanna Die," an ebullient hybrid of machine funk and pop-punk where worrying and amusing turns of phrase spill out, or the coupled vignettes "Tofu" and "Fried Rice," oddball odes to food's medicinal power that are as joyous as Kool & the Gang's "Fruitman." Other tunes have philosophical perspectives. "Remedy" reckons with the impossibility of instant permanent solutions and sagely views self-acceptance and recovery as long processes: "Remedy isn't easy/Hundreds of bees work to make the honey." Here's to Thackray seeing a payoff beyond this brilliant and enriching work of art. ~ Andy Kellman