Picture this: you’re at an uptight party where everyone is standing around with their hands in their pockets, and right there in the middle is one person dancing wildly and with utter abandon, having more fun than everyone else combined. Maylee Todd is that person.
Luckily for us, there’s plenty of that energy and undeniable charisma on the Toronto musician's sophomore album, Escapology (out on April 2, but streaming below in advance), which spans everything from funk and disco-boogie to soul and singer-songwriter.
ListenStream Escapology by Maylee Todd (click here to purchase the album).
Tracklist
“We like to call it really feelin’ it music," says Todd of her sound, over email, reached while travelling in the Philippines where she’s “exploring my roots, my history, staying in native villages in the mountains, getting to know and understand other cultures, people and their way of life, and most importantly, getting to understand my mother and myself. It's been real heavy.”
Escapology builds on the buzz from Todd’s well received 2010 debut, Choose Your Own Adventure, the recent Prism Prize-nominated video for her sure-to-be summer jam “Baby’s Got It,” as well as her James Brown-like ability to command the stage (which she’s used to open for the likes of Janelle Monáe, Aloe Blacc and Lee Fields).
Taking the album name from a poster for her grandfather — “He was the number one escapologist of Canada. I think this was back in the ’50s,” she says — there is a constant push and pull to Escapology, which varies between upbeat dance-funk (“Hieroglyphics”), soul ballads with vocals reminiscent of a young Michael Jackson (”Did Everything I Could”) and stripped-down lullabies with nothing but her saccharine voice and a Paraguayan harp (“Successive Mutations”).
Love and relationships, both realized and unrequited, come up a lot, from “Baby’s Got It,” a celebratory ode to the opposite sex, to “I Tried,” a sultry lament for a former lover, which slowly builds itself up into a squealing howl of sexual frustration at the thought of “sleeping in my single bed.”
For Todd — who is also known for her electronic pop side project Maloo, as well as her previous work with bands such as Henri Fabergé and the Adorables, Woodhands and the Bicycles— the album was a chance “to be honest about myself, my experiences,” she says. “I feel that, lyrically, in the instrumentation and while in the recording process, that sentiment came through.”
In terms of being honest, Todd, who also produced the album, says she “wanted to capture a time before drum machines and arpeggiators,” so in turn recorded a lot of the sections live off the floor, such as the vocals, strings and horns. “Plus we used natural reverb by capturing the sound of the room,” she says, adding that she was playing with all sorts of different genres and movements: “Tropicalia percussion, tones and fuzzed out guitars, obviously the boogie era, claps and synth bass lines, Al Green-inspired snares and string sections. And of course Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton have always been some of my faves.”
The result is an album that looks back, but without any sort of forced nostalgia. Todd's not just borrowing certain aspects of older forms of music and contemporizing them: she’s embracing the original sounds wholeheartedly.
You could draw comparisons between Todd and some contemporary revivalists, such as Monáe, but where the latter is very much one style — a shirt-and-tie take on R&B and soul — Todd has a full wardrobe to work with (which at one point included stuffed animal costumes). There's even a comparison to make (although a lesser one) with the throwback style of Solange's breakthrough EP, True, if perhaps Solange spent less time with deep Brandy cuts and more time with Sly and the Family Stone and the Pointer Sisters.
Appropriately enough, the Sisters’ “Pinball Countdown,” which most of us will remember from Sesame Street, is covered on the album without even the smallest hint of irony.
“I always referenced that song in high school and throughout elementary school,” Todd says. “It seemed quite fitting to do for Escapology, plus it was a fun challenge for us because of the time signatures."
"Fun" being a key word for the album as a whole, but with a running time of just over 30 minutes, the only criticism is that there simply isn’t more of it.
Follow Jesse Kinos-Goodin on Twitter: @JesseKG
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