Jessie Evans and her debut album, Is It Fire, caught my eye because of some its collaborators, including Toby Dammit (Iggy Pop, Swans) and Budgie (The Creatures, Siouxsie and The Banshees), and the fact it was recorded in Berlin by Thomas Stern (Einstürzende Neubauten, Crime and The City Solution). Perhaps that’s not the fairest way to judge whether to listen to a record or not, but in this case, it turned out just swimmingly. The record is a perfect blend between the two places it was created: Mexico and Berlin. There’s Latin flavour pumping through the sultry cabaret vocal style, and there’s some wonky saxophone and Afro-electro beats woven in as well. It’s like a spaced-out Old/New World fusion with a rime of retro cool; the cover art gives you some indication as Evans wields maracas while looking like a Marlene Dietrich figure (in other photos she looks a bit like a 20s flapper). According to her MySpace page, Evans has spent the last decade in bands like The Vanishing, Autonervous and Subtonix, and she has also collaborated with the likes of sexy electro group Glass Candy. Classy and dirty, this album conveys the beauty of the underground, past and present, and transatlantic. A primal sexuality in the lyrics becomes inseparable from the primal rhythm of the music.
The title track sashays in first with Latin percussion and honking saxes, and Evans’ vocals come in with a cool, tantalizing flavour. It makes you want to salsa around on a lit-up disco floor with brisk and tight movements. And the lyrics set the precedent for undisguised, tangible lust: Is it lust that keeps me begging on my knees?/Is it a masochist that makes a fool of me?/Am I wanting you or haunting me oh please.” The percussion varies slightly for Scientist of Love, which showcases a side of Evans’ vocals that sounds a bit like Alison Goldfrapp, but the song still moves its hips to the same Latin beat with some lower, grinding saxophone. When she sings “Come over explorers/let go of your horrors,” she sounds both strong and playful, and throughout the song, she proves that attraction is something that cannot be analyzed mentally. The next track, Blood and Silver, sounds like a fast and loose samba with sprays of sliding trumpet, and Evans sings it completely in Spanish (it’s one of those songs that makes me wish I had cared about keeping up my own trumpet playing). The mood of the album remains spicy with Class Magic, but it also starts to shift into a slightly more electro direction as it pulses with faint synth buzzes. Once again Evans is commanding in her slinky imperatives:
If you feel you’ve got it
Then you better flaunt it
If you want to own it
Then I guess we’d better haunt it
Say it if you mean it
But love it when you leave it
Put your hands together and
We move down to the C now
The slightly more electro-influenced beat continues with Let Me On, but the song feels lighter and more understated than earlier tracks. There is still some tenor sax keeping everything grounded, but with her wispy, breathy “ooh’s,” the song seems to stay on a low simmer rather than a full lusty boil.
Featuring some accordion, Ninos del Espacio also retains some synth sounds to convey the theme of “cosmic lovers” – the electronic elements almost seem to create a sonic wind while Evans’ Spanish lyrics and her alternately smooth and percussive delivery twists and pummels you into submission. After the brief interlude of Micheladas, a sound effects track that sounds like coins rapidly spinning against echoey laughter, Golden Snake slithers in with call-and-answer saxes and distant trumpets. Of all the songs, this one sounds quite retro and cabaret as it writhes to provocative lyrics like “I’m in paradise/Yes its very nice/Got my sex wrapped around my throat/Like a golden snake.” The sounds in Micheladas make sense as Evans continues some coy, throaty laughter, and sings “I’m spinning like a top” while taking on a persona of flapper vamp. Slightly less Latin, Black Sand still has fantastic, lightly flamenco rhythms underneath the electronics. Evans’ vocals are fluid while her musical backdrop is incessantly staccato, making her seduction both lulling and frantic. We move back to a quicker beat with To the Sun, and those intoxicating honking saxophones emerge again; the percussion is allowed really to take centre-stage as the vocal involvement is a minimal drone of “to the sun” in the background. There’s something both jungle-like and Latin going on, or perhaps the song just makes it all the clearer how music evolves and how it links across genres. It’s a long beautiful jam that lasts over nine minutes. The record ends with Sera El Fuego, which is the Spanish version of the title track and takes us to a beautiful full circle while providing a different dimension to the vocal performance.
Tribal and glamorous, Is It Fire? is a pure dance record. You can’t help but move to it as though attached to some preliterate, innate need to make and feel rhythm. I don’t often pay too much close attention to percussion, but for this album, it becomes one of the prominent stars – intricate, insistent, internal. This fact probably points to the fact there are two star percussionists who worked on this album. The beats feel like the most natural in the world while the other musical components combine with Jessie Evans’ voice to create a glamorous, old-style cabaret sound that could be at home in either Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin or Paris. Listening to this record is a sensual experience, the auditory equivalent of mardi gras, carnivale, decadent cabarets; it wreaks rebellion and puts the Latin back in carpe diem.
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