Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and its time for you to put those D-I-Y tools down for a few moments while I deliver yet another daily track on the blog to your eardrums and eye sight, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Also known for her recent cover of Yoko Ono’s ‘Dogtown’ for last month’s ‘Ocean Child: Songs Of Yoko Ono’ compilation album, Sudan Archives (the solo music project of violinist and vocalist Brittney Denise Parks) is a psychedelic soul and experimental R&B artist who has built up a reputation amongst the internet music community with her well-received blending of organic, African-inspired instrumentation with more futuristic, electronic music elements. She is yet to follow up on her debut album, 2019’s ‘Athena’, which included the fantastic single ‘Confessions’. Nonetheless, her resume includes the headline artist slot for the Stones Throw Showcase at the South By Southwest cultural festival earlier this year. Parks has studied ethnomusicology at Passadena City College, she has performed as part of a string quartet and she has earned plenty of support from sources like BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP, The Guardian and The Quietus. Her latest single – ‘Home Maker’ – is an exploration of the bliss which Parks can feel in her domestic life, and it was prompted by her emotions when moving from Los Angeles to her place of birth in Cincinnati, Ohio. Let’s watch the Jocelyn Anquetil-directed music video for this below.
Parks is set to perform live at the All Points East Festival in London this August, and, talking about the single’s themes of approaching the mundanity of domestic chores by re-imagining them as dream-like activities set to a lush, Utopian background, she says, “It took nesting – building a home, investing in partners that were worth my investment – to shake my anxiety and depression”, explaining, “For me, homemaking is a service to mental health and coping with fear and isolation. This song is about the effort put into making a relationship work and giving love a place to live”, in her press release. The opening has a darker tone than expected, as Parks recites a rhythmic series of lyrics like “Only bad b**ches in my trells/And baby, I’m the baddest” and “I’ve just got a wall mount for my plants/And hoping that they’ll thrive around the madness” with a sturdy Hip-Hop deliver that contrast the warmth of urging a partner to be around you at your lowest times with the darkness of cultivating a nest of your own self-doubt. Shifts between utter confidence with later lyrics like “Won’t you step inside my lovely cottage/Feels so green, it feels like f***ing magic” and self-created uncertainty with other lyrics like “My mood’s been real sloppy/I cry when I’m alone” that feel confessional in mood while self-accepting in total as she concedes her issues with mental health, and these shifts similarly show contrasting qualities between self-assured pride and self-loathing jabs. It is also quite interesting when “I’m a home maker” is made to sound like “I’m a heart breaker” in the chorus, as it shows that she’s conjuring up a seductive vision of home life despite nothing explicit being argued, while the more cheerful sections effectively banish any thought of anxiety. One of the big highlights is the bridge where, elevated by percussive hand-claps and the occasionally sweeping string, Parks chants the refrain of “Do you not feel at home when you’re with me” as she goes full throttle into Nu-Disco mood with the Jazz influence. The rest of the track’s instrumentation soundtracks her journey to discovering self-worth, through all of her trials and tribulations mentally, in similar ways. We start off with a high-Bass synth that evolves into a smoother Synth groove punctuated by glistening Keys and the rare strum of a rhythm guitar, which is all based around the programmed drums too, before the bridge allows us to breathe a sigh of relief with its more upbeat qualities. Overall, ‘Home Maker’ is a truly excellent new single that evokes a sense of really inviting us into her world, while feeling diverse enough to tell a loose narrative and feeling experimental with its blend of different genres, proving that she’s capable of bending genre rules to meet her needs.
Thank you for checking out my latest post on the blog, and don’t forget how much that your support has meant to me today, as I just reminded you of it. I’ll be back tomorrow for more music-related musings as we review one of the latest singles by an emerging indie punk 3-piece formed in Glasgow and London born out of a shared interest in unconventional songwriting. They have received support from DIY, The Line Of Best Fit and Amazing Radio. The group have over 2k monthly Spotify listeners.
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