We have witnessed the creation of a series of woman-fronted ‘electro-classical” outfits in the past few years.
There were the all-girl electric string quartets Sterling EQ and Electro Muse and, of course, Afro-jazz fusion band Coda. And now we have Translate, which released their debut album, Wanderlust, this month.
The singer and brains behind the outfit, Larah Eksteen, is clearly a multitalented sort. She runs a video-editing business on the side and is trained in classical music, cutting her teeth as a session musician. She even produced the album, with the final mastering by One F Music studios’ Paul Riekert, of Battery 9 fame.
She’s clearly worked hard to get to this point and I wanted to like her commercial music offering. But by pushing the music to ‘spread across many genres” as the press release about the nascent band so awfully puts it, the songs run the risk of being neither here nor there. They start wonderfully and then degenerate into a mindlessly repeated refrain as in Yellow, or segue into a bizarre bridge seemingly out of nowhere, as in the first track, Fairest.
In an attempt to please everyone, including the ‘difficult jazz cats”, as the same press release puts it, the album lacks punch.
Babes with strings
Like the other female-dominated bands in this genre, the duo trade off the ‘sexiness” of their music — think babes with strings. In keeping with this tired marketing tactic, Translate is a sensual duo, we are told. But one can’t help but feel that sexiness in music is a bit like the personal variety: the more you try, the less it works.
Indeed, where the pair venture into dark and sensuous territory, they come across as a poor man’s Lark — that powerhouse South African homage to trip-hop.
They’re best when they stick to the whimsical and near-esoteric tunes that mostly dominate the album. But here the harmonising, though technically perfect, can be cloying. Tellingly, the strongest tracks on the album are their covers of bossa nova great Antônio Carlos Jobim’s How Insensitive and Home. The former has no vocals, and the latter is more devoted to a jazzy Afro-fusion sound than to their voices.
Solid production
This is not to say that their sound cannot be fun and catchy. Their virtuosity on their instruments — double bass and violin — can’t help but shine through, as does Eksteen’s solid production skills.
One can imagine a crowd loving the music at the corporate events that Eksteen is adept at working. But she may need to do a bit more work to get that success to ‘translate”, as it were, to a commercial album.