The Visitor

Kadhja Bonet's music could easily belong in another time, a hybrid between the past and the future. On her debut album, Kadhja - pronounced "kod-ya" - invites us into a world not wholly our own, where past and future meet in a parallel, yet far lovelier, present.

The Visitor opens with an awe you'd expect from the golden age of cinema. In its half-mythical atmosphere, "Earth Birth" offers keys and choirs science-fictionally echoing down from deep space. This overture fades and Kadhja's voice velvetly emerges on "Honeycomb" with a timelessness sending listeners scrambling to find her nearest genre. After running through classical, jazz, soul, folk, and even psychedelia, you find it ultimately impossible to comfortably place her. This is all by Kadhja's design. For if she were "folk" it would only be the folk of some future aeon, a thousand hears hence. If her rich instrumentation of strings and wind strikes us as a "classic," it's not because it harkens to any past era, but because Kadhja paints perennial imagery that could as much be now as then as any other time.

The Visitor is an opus unpolluted by the mixed advice or overproductions that plague other albums. It plays through like one individual's lucid dream in what is sometimes an all-too-dreamless musical landscape. Once we hear it, we recognize it as something that's been harder and harder to find in the last thirty or forty years, though so badly missed. Kadhja has humbly learned from her predecessors while following their signs ever forward."