Music - Kelli Rae Powell

The Scandalous Accounts Of My Youth by Kelli Rae Powell

I don't really know how people find Kelli Rae Powell's music. There seems to be no obvious straight path that would logically lead you to it. No simple direct line of influence or easy 'sounds like' reference points. I guess, like me, many people are just lucky enough to know someone with the good taste to recommend it. And in many ways that alone says a lot about Kelli Rae's music.

There's something about this album that just makes you want to tell everyone you know all about it. It makes you want to sit people down and say, stop what you're doing and listen to this, really listen because you need this album in your life.

"The Scandalous Accounts Of My Youth" is an album of gloriously unapologetic contradictions: simple yet complex, quirky yet accessible, contemporary but timeless, raw and still somehow endlessly poetic.

Many tracks feature just Kelli Rae and her ukulele, a fact that is easily forgotten with seemingly so much music coming through the speakers. Vocally her style sometimes bears something of a resemblance to 1920's jazz and cabaret singers, yet the subject matter, and lyrics, are irrefutably contemporary (barring one slight sprinkling of Latin).

So, on with the contradictions, how can pain sound so beautiful? How can introspection become so expressive and how do you give modern life the kind of poetic quality usually reserved for the times of Baudelaire or Victor Hugo?

Somehow Kelli Rae has taken all the frustration, beauty, romance and pain of modern life, folded it all in to a neat little package and placed it in the palm of your hand.

However you find this album, be it a well informed recommendation or simple blind luck, I urge you not to it slip through you fingers. "Kelli Rae Powell"