Marla Lewis has been raising a lot of eyebrows in the jazz music community, and it isn’t hard to understand why when indulging in the melodic fantasy that is her new single “Enchantée.” Within moments of her voice connecting with the bassline for the first time, we’re throttled by a percussive athleticism that matches the immaculate color of the vocal perfectly. There’s a bit of pomp in the instrumentation, but not so much that it would sound plain and unoriginal, and wrapped in the layers of surreal synths and pumping bass we find our singer, whose voice is ethereal amid all the other textures present. Here, she’s at once simple and complicated, similar to the very nature of love itself.
The swing in the rhythm is muted for the majority of “Enchantée,” but it’s just powerful enough in the mix to make us want to dance through every major movement in the track. While experimentalists are going to hear this song and immediately imagine twisting it into new and exciting jams, I don’t think that Lewis conceived this narrative with the avant-garde scene in her mind. The vocal is too integral a factor in the progression of the track for it to be a dance song exclusively, and though it might be a little heavy for some mainstream ears, it’s got an alternative component that makes it a unique listen this season by any critical measurement.
I would say that the percussion needed a tad more oomph in the chorus than it gets, but it’s an excusable, surface-level flaw that doesn’t change anything about the core identity of “Enchantée.” Honestly, while there are a couple of minor issues of this kind in the content this genre has released through the 2020s, she’s one of the more focused and reliably emotional artists to come out of the underground in the past year from my perspective. Other than some of the more obscure artists who have been making some waves over on the west coast recently, Lewis is probably the most promising of the indie headliners making waves this April, and the warm reception this latest cut is getting is proof of as much.
Slow club-goers and jazz fiends can agree that Marla Lewis is an artist we all need to be watching right now. In “Enchantée,” we get the right mixture of supple melodies and monolithic grooves to feel inspired about the summer waiting on the horizon while also enjoying a sublime master mix that does the music justice, and for it coming from a recording artist who has not yet released a proper album thus far, it couldn’t be much more polished a gem. The underground talent pool is brimming with singers, songwriters, and producers brimming with raw potential right now, and if you needed some convincing that the future of jazz is going to be just as good – if not better – than its past was, this would be a track and an artist I would recommend picking up a lot sooner than later.
Heather Savage
