Spirituals

This whirlwind album is full of feeling and fervour, and its liveliness affirms just why she is a singular talent.

She created a very enjoyable album filled with so much personality and emotion that it’s hard to deny the beauty of it. While the length does make you question what could have been, the 10-tracks presented are so masterfully done and built to be put on repeat.

Spirituals is tonally consistent despite its range of distinctive influences and talents. Just when Santigold threatens to lean into the corny, as on the SBTRKT-produced Shake, she pulls back, adding a whimsical, purposefully on-the-nose rattle sound at the end of each wedding disco-like “shake, shake, shake it” hook. It’s a joy to hear her back in her creative swing.

Not all of the tracks are wholly successful, and on occasion the vocal clarity is hidden from view. Yet that barely matters, for the fierce spirit remains. Spirituals is both old and new at the same time – drawing on the human spirit, but using cutting edge electronics to do it. Playing to Santigold’s strengths through inventive beats and melodies, it is a fine return.

Spirituals’ gets more brutalist as it goes on, weaving its way from tropical space-pop through cosmic reggae to the gothic R&B cranks and coils of ‘Ain’t Ready’ and, finally, to ‘Fail First’, a wonderfully New Order-ish concoction of indietronic chug, industrial grunge guitars, spectral cheerleader chants and punkoid yells.

Sweetly haunting, melodic and defiant, Santigold has created the perfect album to guide listeners from hazy summer nights into the cold light of new days ahead.

Spirituals is peppered with clunky, too-literal lyrics that disrupt the spell cast by the music’s emotion. But by the end, we get a glimpse of the next phase of Santigold’s artistry—a project not bound by genre, form, physicality, or language.

Spirituals is an album that takes admirably big swings in its desire to shake all constraints off, and inevitably, there is messiness in the movement. The risks pay off, but leave some of the tracks in the album’s middle stretch to play supporting roles.

Auto-Tuned electro-soul, reggae-lite rhythms and deceptively political lyrics are key motifs here, although Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs lends some grungey thrust to "Fall First." [Nov 2022, p.36]

Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.

Wanting more of something is hardly the worst criticism to be leveled at an album. With this long-awaited release, Santigold has once more shown the world she’s one of the game’s most unique, imaginative, and fun creators. It’s good to have her back.

Where ‘Spirituals’ - which both marks a return from a four-year break and Santi’s first release as an independent artist - works best, is as reminder and introduction. The cut-and-paste, mixtape ethos that shone through in the first place is still there.