BABY ROSE & BADBADNOTGOOD - SLOW BURN

Released: 26/07/24

Possessed of a truly extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime voice that belies her youth (how is it possible that one so fresh-faced sound like a grande dame of soul at her mid-career peak?), Baby Rose – AKA Washington DC native Jasmine Rose Wilson – made her name with the excellent progressive R&B of her three studio albums to date, which mines a similar path as peers such as Solange. Which is all nice and dandy, but it’s her new record, a collaboration with brilliant Canadian alt-jazz/hip-hop weirdos BADBADNOTGOOD, that should take her to a whole new level. 

The wonder of Slow Burn is the way it ignores the production tropes of modern soul and R&B, instead going full tilt into a heady mix of Muscle Shoals live-in-the-room analogue warmth, jazz and psych. Brilliantly augmented by BADBADNOTGOOD in backing band mode, who play with a lovely restraint a deftness of touch – the group have the smarts to understand that with a talent like Wilson, less is considerably more – Slow Burn plays like an alt-American Songbook, featuring songs so good that they easily sit with the best of the canon, but made beguilingly strange by Wilson’s otherworldly voice.