Posts Tagged ‘A.A. Williams’

A.A. WILLIAMS – ” Nights In White Satin ” (The Moody Blues Cover)

Posted: February 2, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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A.A. Williams

Making her stage debut in April 2019 and selling out her first headline show at London’s prestigious Southbank Centre less than a year later, A.A. Williams has hit the ground running. Similarly, the acclaim for her performances and her music has been unanimous from the start. After one self-titled EP and the 10” vinyl collaboration “Exit in Darkness” with Japanese post-rockers MONO, the London-based singer-songwriter has signed to Bella Union and made a stunning debut album, “Forever Blue”.

A rapturous blend of post-rock and post-classical, Forever Blue smoulders with uncoiling melodies and haunted atmospheres, shifting from serenity to explosive drama, often within the same song. Williams is a fantastic musician as well as songwriter, playing the guitar, cello and piano, and her voice has the controlled delivery of a seasoned chanteuse whilst still channelling the rawest of emotions.

Forever Blue is named after a song that didn’t make the album’s final cut, “but it still encapsulated these songs,” Williams explains. “It sounded timeless and in the right place.” The album’s threads encapsulate the anxieties and addiction of love and loss with haunting detail, for example ‘Glimmer’(“I wasn’t meant to see the sun washed out and pale / I wait undone / I wasn’t meant to be the one hollow and hurt and meant for none”), though Williams admits the theme was shaped more by her subconscious than any grand plan.

Therapy is intrinsic to Williams’ approach: to not just express and unpick her feelings of longing and loss but to work through them. “Verbalising something, you feel a weight has been lifted,” she says. The transition can be mirrored in the dynamic shift from ‘quiet’ to ‘loud’, as on ‘Glimmer’ and arguably at its most euphoric on ‘Melt’. “There’s something very satisfying and elating about songs that have that drop in them, to stomp on the guitar pedal on and let it all out.”

Forever Blue will spread the news of A.A. Williams’ extraordinary talent far and wide – and once lockdown is over, she and her band will be taking the next steps on her journey by touring the record. She’s already come so far but this story is only just beginning. For the past year or so, dark singer/songwriter A.A. Williams has been releasing gloomy, minimal covers that put a hauntingly beautiful spin on the originals, and here’s another great one. She makes the ’60s prog-pop hit sound like something that could’ve come out on ’80s 4AD.

Taken from the album ‘Songs From Isolation’ by A.A. Williams

MONO & A.A.WILLIAMS – ” Exit in Darkness “

Posted: May 4, 2020 in MUSIC
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Firmly placed as both progenitor and progressor within their field, MONO is like no other artist – visceral, engrossing and showing no signs of decay after two decades spent creating waves of beautiful and expansive rock music. Many an artist lays claim to setting the template – or many have this claim placed upon them – but this Japanese artist has long-since simply set their own template. Listening to MONO is like entering another world, where the majesty of the noise embraces you and the delicacy of the space around it breathes warmly in your ear.

A.A. Williams came from nowhere. An EP arrived in January 2019, and a debut show at the prestigious Roadburn Festival three months later confirmed what this first taste of music had suggested: this is a special artist. The woman in black: one arm aloft after the delicate yet decisive strum of a chord, a stillness in the room focused on the graceful soaring of a unique voice. To arrive so fully formed is a feat in itself; to take the audience’s breath away with such immediacy is something else entirely.

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As soon as MONO’s Takaakira ‘Taka’ Goto heard the music of A.A. Williams, an unwavering resonance was triggered. For A.A. Williams, the appreciation was emphatically mutual. A musical connection developed into a collaboration; introductions were made, ideas exchanged. At the end of MONO’s 2019 summer tour, these ideas were committed to tape in London and the result is ‘Exit in Darkness’ – a mesmeric coming together of two artists from opposite ends of the globe whose creative approach could not have melded more eloquently.

Released December 13th, 2019