Kimbra - Vows

Vows’ cover art—depicting the 21-year-old Kiwi covered in monochromatic, van Gogh-eqsue drawings—belies its contents; it could not be a greater misdirection for an album bursting with colourful turns.

Having already proven her vocal acumen with cameos on Miami Horror’s ‘I Look To You’ and Gotye’s gargantuan hit ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’, all that remained to Kimbra was to show she could write a tune worthy of her stellar pipes. Vows delivers on that score, and its scope is far more ambitious than any debut has any business being.

These 51 minutes testify to her energy and creativity, particularly how well she wields her impulsiveness—she has the attention span of a cocker-spaniel, and the youthful agility to sate it. One’s first trip through feels rather like coming off your bike and falling through a bush—it takes a while to feel your way out through the thickets and brambles.

Her penchant for genre-hopping makes the whole album difficult to process, initially. Kimbra straddles a mood, takes it for a spin then ditches it at her leisure. ‘Two Way Street’ sounds like a lounge-Passion Pit; ‘Cameo Lover’ is all muffled synth blasts and sugary xylophone; ‘Call Me’ is backed by elastic funk, punchy horns and a walking bassline right out of Bobby Brown’s ‘Every Little Step’. It could be an unlistenable mess under the wrong caretaker, but Kimbra commands the hubbub like a pro. As such, she’ll inevitably draw comparisons to Florence Welch. It’s a fair call as far as poise and presence goes, but not execution; Kimbra draws her vocals, often like treacle, from a deeper well—Florence is helium light by contrast. Janelle Monae and the musical roulette wheel that was last year’s The ArchAndroid would be a better fit: each carry a very wide breadth of style on the strength of their voices.

There are moments when she reigns her frenetic moxie in a little (a tasteful cover of Nina Simone’s ‘Plain Gold Ring’, and soulful slow-jam ‘Withdraw’), but these are just the winding of the jack-in-the-box before Kimbra again pops out, bright-eyed and bouncing off the walls.

However, there is an erringly deep incongruence between Vows’ rugged, chaotic spirit and the slick, plastic sheen of its production. Save for the delightfully cavernous ‘Wandering Limb’, an artificial safety pervades, slightly undermining Kimbra’s wild charm.

As experimental as it is, if Vows proves anything, it’s that the girl knows her way around a pop-song. There’s a simple piano-based nucleus hiding in the shadow of all the bells and whistles, a constant foundation keeping the whole thing from teetering too far into absurdity. Vows is the sound of Kimbra straining at those self-created moors, and the tension is splendorous when it works—and a little overwraught when it doesn’t.