The daughter of blues legend Taj Mahal has forged her own path towards this debut album – gently rocking soul and R&B that nonetheless feels just apposite enough for 2018. The title track, released last November as part of a three-song EP, garnered some love for the way it filtered vintage Lauryn Hill vibes into an Amy Winehouse earworm. Elton John played Run Deep on his Beats 1 show. Even better was Snakes, a tremendous call-and-response blues stomper whose visually striking animated shadow-play video illustrated the song’s timely message: watch out for snakes, and own your own power.
The album’s arc actually finds Mahal wrestling with attraction, love and heartbreak, moving smoothly through various classic tropes – piano balladry, 70s soul – before ending up on the synthetic, 80s-indebted anthem-pop of Wicked. Your ears prick up, too, around the Optimist mark, where a gnarly guitar riff recalls Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. Mahal was recently part of a musical tribute to Led Zeppelin at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and there are times here when you wish her ample lungs would cut loose in anger or lust rather than sorrow, and that the album’s sepia classicism would find some more room for experimentation.
