Lost Where I Belong

Andreya Triana owes the existence of this album to a chance meeting with Simon Green, aka Bonobo, who featured her on his Black Sands album and then offered to produce her first full-length effort. The result is a debut album of impressive beauty and maturity, one that documents a long musical and personal voyage fraught with heartbreak, but never succumbs to self-indulgent sentiment or confessional mawkishness. Part of what keeps things tight is Green's production style. The setting he creates for "Draw the Stars" is both completely unique (marimbas, strings, unidentifiable percussion) and straightforwardly beautiful, hinting at funkiness without stating it explicitly. He gets much more outspokenly funky on the horn-driven "Up in Fire," and torchy on "Daydreamers," and jazzy on "Far Closer," and his arrangements are almost invariably brilliant. But it's Triana's voice that moves these songs from the realm of the pleasantly unusual to the borderline transcendent. Its smoky tone colors every track and her effortless phrasing weaves through the instrumental parts like a supple, muscular snake. She responds to the simmering rhythm of "Darker Than Blue" with a perfect sultriness, and to the quiet torch song mood of "Daydreamers" with dignified regret. On "Something in the Silence" she sounds a bit off-balance, and never seems to feel quite at home with the Brazilian tug of the rhythm. But everywhere else her mastery of the material and of her own musical vision is complete, and the result is a thrill to hear.