Greentea Peng


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Man Made (2021), 7/10
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London's sensual neosoul chanteuse Aria Wells, aka Greentea Peng debuted with the seven-song EP Sensi (2018), a mix of soul, trip-hop and dub that was crafted by producer Earbuds. The highlight is the quasi-psychedelic Moonchild. Owen Cutts produced the single that made her famous, the atmospheric Downers (2019), while Earbuds again produced her six-song EP Rising (2019), with the trap beat of Mr Sun. She learned to fuse Sade's sensual and smooth moaning with Erykah Badu's intellectual trance. Following the singles Hu Man (2020) and Revolution (2020), she released her first album, Man Made (2021). Mostly inspired by psychedelic soul of the 1960s, constantly shaken by booming bass lines, the album incorporates the same elements of the singles: dub, trip-hop, reggae and jazz. The highlights are: Jimtastic Blues, a chant over a tribal-jazz-industrial polyrhythm, the lysergic waltzing lullaby Maya, the jovial street fanfare This Sound, the colloquial funk-jazz rigmarole Nah It Ain't The Same and the hypnotic seven-minute prog-Caribbean-jam Meditation. The production is littered with disorienting sounds: the hard-rock guitar of Sinner, the jump-blues propulsion of Satta, the castrated bossanova guitar of Suffer and especially the Indian flute of Be Careful. But the chromatic peak of the album comes with songs like Party Hard Interlude and Poor Man Skit, where both voice and instruments engage in ethereal free-form wandering.

(Copyright © 2021 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )