Ayoe Angelica
I'm Amazed

A PLEASANT SURPRISE

The blog that introduces me to this album categorizes it with the tags: chillout, downtempo, electronic, female vocal, jazz, nu jazz, soul, soul-jazz.
I suspect it's the usual "half dud": seductive female voice and soft melodies that soon become cloying and boringly monotonous.
However, the character is intriguing, and the unique name of this beautiful Danish singer of Ethiopian origin prompts me to search for her videos on YouTube.

The video for "Dr. Jekyll", the first track of the album, is a pleasant surprise, as are all the other tracks of "I'm Amazed". The dark and retro atmosphere of the black and white video accompanies an amiably melancholic track that echoes the style of Portishead in a slightly more pop version.
All the other songs are also pleasantly listenable, an ideal soundtrack for creating a calm and relaxed atmosphere.

I-Tunes has improperly placed Ayoe in the top ten of the jazz category but the sounds of this album are very heterogeneous, ranging from trip-hop to R&B mixed with jazz and electronic sounds that wink at lounge settings. Probably the album Sade would have made if she had started singing today instead of 25 years ago.
Ayoe's voice stands out both in the more rhythmic tracks ("Sugar", "Also On A Tuesday") and in more rarefied atmospheres like those of "Face With Nobody".
The final result positively benefits from the collaboration of the producer and composer Mads B. B. Krog aka Plateaux Techniques to whom abundant thanks are dedicated in the liner notes.

The album's rating is 3.5 / 5 rounded up to 4 for the girl's social commitment (she has allocated 10% of the earnings to charity for the poor children of Ethiopia, her country of origin) hoping to be impartial enough despite her photos on Flickr having made me fall in love with her.

If the genre is to your liking, I invite you to listen to her and I believe you will not be disappointed. If she achieves the success she deserves, we can say we discovered her, while if she remains unknown, we will still have the pleasure of having her album in our music collection.