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Only a very few performers put out their debut album having already established themselves as frontrunners for the Grammy for best new artist. Sienna Spiro is in that category, and let’s just say that “The Visitor,”
her first full-length release, does nothing to diminish her chances in the category. As the title hints, it’s an album of songs written largely about feeling like a temporary intruder in the lives of others, especially cavalier men. But it’s unlikely that we’ll look back 10 or 20 years from now and think that Spiro was just a pop-culture transient. Hers is a voice that ought to have a lifetime’s staying power, bolstered by a lyrical and musical sensibility that provide everything her instrument needs to deliver a happy succession of knockout blows.
We should probably say “happy-sad,” because no one will mistake “The Visitor” for a bundle of good cheer, even if the effect of experiencing her powerhouse chops is inevitably a euphoric one. The table has already been well set by her signature song, “Die on This Hill,” which made the top 20 in the U.S. last fall, and will probably have the enduring quality of a No. 1. Spiro has already instantly sold out a North American tour this fall based largely on the strength of that tune, along with some other keepers that have dribbled out, one by one, in the interim. It might count as a classic ballad even if it just stuck to its verses and choruses and didn’t include a bridge. But it has a corker, leading up to the cathartic moment when she repeats the phrase “I wish something mattered,” prefacing it with “God….” the second time, for a flash of emphatic anger. It’s around this point you either become putty in her hands or might have to admit to some bizarre immunity to emotional deliverance.
Thankfully, there is a lot more where that came from in the unabashedly ballad-heavy “The Visitor.” Her voice could take her into a lot of different modes, and she’s proven already that it sounds pretty terrific with a full band and a beat, as with last year’s non-LP single “Dream Police” or the Amy Winehouse-esque song she contributed to the “Devil Wears Prada 2” soundtrack, “Material Lover.” That latter tune is included as a bonus track on the deluxe digital version of the new album. But for the 10 songs on the standard edition of this debut, the decision has been made to streamline her approach and keep it mostly to soul-searching slow songs, largely based around piano and orchestration, that extend the mood of that hit about the to-die-for hill. I’m eager to hear Spiro expand her stylistic range into bops, at some point. But for the moment I’m even more eager for her to keep mining this vein she’s struck, when the payoff is “The Visitor,” a collection rich in heartache and high points.
If you’re young and prone to sticking with situationships you ought to be extracting yourself from, proceed immediately to this album. (If you’re old and still addicted to situationships, consult a mental health professional first, then enjoy the record.) There may be some cognitive dissonance as you ask yourself: Could a woman who exudes this much pure power ever be as passive in a relationship as she paints herself in some of these songs? Well, for Pete’s sake, she is 20, so the answer is: Of course she can. And it’s an intriguing juxtaposition that is much in the tradition of early Adele, who first came to the world’s attention as a sort of foghorn-doormat. When a woman who sounds like she could huff and puff and blow all our houses down confesses to multiple layers of vulnerability, we stop and pay attention.
The opening track on the album is its biggest outlier, as “This Is My House” opens with a sweet, vintage R&B groove and a positive message about maintaining a healthy sense of self-ownership in relationships. Spiro borrows part of that message from the famous poet Nikki Giovanni, who recorded her poem of that same name as a song in 1975 with producer Arif Mardin, making for the only sample or interpolation on the album. (For a minute it recalls Sabrina Carpenter’s recent “House Tour,” except this one is not 100% about sex.) But from there, we move on to the record’s more dominant theme, in “We’re Not in Love,” which has Spiro lamenting, “We’re not in love, but we make love, and that don’t make no sense.” (This one is about sex, with the album’s most provocative lines: “You go down while I’m up in my head / And you left after I got undressed / And that’s unbelievable.”) “I’ll get close to you,” she vows, but “not enough to break.”
It would be easy to describe “The Visitor” as an album full of torch songs, especially given the retro styling of a lot of the material, which can hark back at times to cabaret as well as vintage soul. But what Spiro is writing about in most of these tunes is something a little more interesting than standard loss-and-longing fare. She’s singing a lot about how it feels to still be in a relationship that’s deeply unrewarding but difficult to quit. And she goes so far as to psychoanalyze herself and try to figure out what that’s about, particularly in “He’s Not My Baby, I’m His,” in which she likens looking for love from a partner to trying to work out some childhood issues. She even throws in some basic arithmetic to show just how unhealthy this might be: “Stroking my hair to stroke my ego / And no one feels quite as seen as when a child gets chosen / And I’m half his age / It’s a right of passage, to know it’s wrong but not quite care.” There’s a lot of wisdom, in that realization of immaturity.
The album’s themes of uncertainty get even more complex in “Pure,” a song that works about three or four different forms of anxiety into one track. “Used to do it all so pure / For the love of the song no more / Now I think about an applause / When I open my mouth,” she admits, which is a pretty brash confession to making on a debut album.” She’s jealous of her mother, for being able to experience real pain, and of her sister, because “at least she can have a good time; at least she can calm down.” By the end of the song, she’s thinking ahead to her deathbed, wondering whether her life will have meant something. It’s not the last time death pops its head up in these songs; Spiro has some bigger thoughts to fry than jsut whether some dude will finally pay her the time of day outside the boudoir, although there’s that, too.
It sounds like some heavy stuff, and at times it surely is. But there’s an elevation to it that comes from the pure spirit-lifting qualities of Spiro’s delivery, which is just magical from start to finish, at least if you’ve got a thing for mezzo-sopranos who have a slight rasp in their belt. (Everybody does have a thing for that, right?) She always gets to the hair-raising part you know is coming, but it’s not always exactly the same path from one verse or chorus to the next, and the catch or break in her voice offers a little thrill each time it unexpectedly sneaks in amid all that perfection. Some of the lyrics quoted above might sound unwieldy if you’re just looking at the page, but the beautiful fluidity of her voice makes even the rawest, randomest stray thought sound organic and lovely. And she doesn’t need to use her words to sound that enrapturing; at least a couple of times, she interrupts the flow of things just to throw in a melismatic “mmmmm” that is as captivating as anything else in the track.
If you want to know if she can tackle an actual Great American Songbook standard, the answer comes with the deluxe edition, which throws in her version of “Autumn Leaves” as a bonus. But the real focus here is on how good her own melancholic Songs of the Summer are. If you like serious drama, the biggest previously unreleased standout might be “Time You & Me,” which sounds like the winning entry in a James Bond theme song sweepstakes. You can’t listen to it even once without imagining how the late Maurice Binder ought to be getting busy on a title-sequence montage.
Respect is due to her primary collaborator here, producer and co-writer Omer Fedi. It’s easy to imagine he has been feeling about working with Spiro how Mark Ronson felt about working with Winehouse, except for the probably more wholesome lifestyle choices that will make for a longer collab. The album’s instrumental approach is basic enough that few will be rushing to congratulate it as an exercise in innovation, but the way these have been recorded to sound like completely live-in-studio performances, whether or not that’s what they were, is worthy of its own Grammy consideration. Who knows which freshmen or relative freshmen the Recording Academy will be deeming most worthy six months down the line, but it’s enough right now to have an album that goes into some depths, even as it gives us a decidedly upward Spiro.
