Corinne Bailey Rae goes out on a limb when she sings. Scoffing at common time signatures, she'll lag behind the beat, or surge ahead of it when the whim strikes. One passage will find her veering off key, while, in the next, she'll snap back just in time to nail the chorus. In a flash, she'll move from a whisper to a shout, spinning enough vocal loop-de-loops along the way to give you the bends.
It's no mean feat to pull off such stunts - to make fanciful quirks like these sound organic - and, believe me, I've seen Rae screw it up spectacularly. A showcase at Hiro Ballroom last month found her mucking up her turn-on-a-dime dynamics into something preening and perverse.
Yet when it clicks, Rae's odd, jazz-tinged take on R&B can impress no end. Clearly, it made a strong impression on enough people to net four top Grammy nominations for her self-titled, 2006 debut CD (including Best New Artist, plus Best Song and Record for "Put Your Records On").
Rae's debut went on to sell 2 million copies in the U.S., making her one of the biggest new artists to spring from Britain in the last decade. She deepened the prestige by guest-starring on 2008's Album of the Year champ, a tribute to Joni Mitchell called "River," on which Rae moaned the title track.
For her followup, "The Sea," Rae hasn't reeled in her ambition an ounce. But, happily, the rigor of the studio allowed her to find the anchor she needed to ground her most potentially ruinous leaps.
Like Rae's debut, "The Sea" boasts an unusually crisp sound. Its striking opener, "Are You Here," slips just a spare guitar riff under Rae's voice, functioning like a mat on top of which she twists her singing into positions of yoga-like elasticity.
The song addresses a defining, and recent, tragedy in Rae's life. During the time she was making "The Sea," her husband of seven years, Jason Rae, died of a drug overdose. Yet "Are You Here" expresses less mourning than a kind of mystical eros, as if proposing a sexy leap into the afterlife.
Like many of the new songs, "Are You Here" has the sensibility and range of jazz, only grounded by the easy hooks of R&B and rock. Imagine a cross between something written by Maxwell or Jeff Buckley, but sung by Minnie Ripperton, and you're getting warm to what's here.
"The Blackest Lily" adds a dash of '60s go-go soul to that mad mix, as does "Paris Nights," with retro flashes that may remind you of Style Council. Yet none of these references stoop to the literal.
The album reaches a zenith of ambition in "I Would Like to Call It Beauty" in which Rae's singing wafts around the melody with the surprise and sexiness of smoke. It's an approach so delicate it threatens to collapse at any moment, yet, in managing not to, dazzles all the more.
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