Delilah
From The Roots Up

At first glance, the mainstream world seems like a vast melting pot of music-churning artists, the triumph of the commercial music biz perfectly suited for lounging eternally atop the charts, a flood of albums, records, and discs with hyper-varied shades, colors, flavors, and scents. In reality, it is not quite so. Even in the realm of major labels, the glittery pop boxes soon begin to become stale, outdated, and obsolete, and those who—while enjoying such productions—do not accept to self-destruct in the long run with the usual hit parade-purge are forced to cross into the limbo of the underground context, or (quite simply) seek alternative routes to the nauseating beach chants. Nowadays, however, a dense highway network of artists, products, and sounds that are not over-inflated and equally unwilling to compromise with the shapeless and easy-going masses is laid out; so, why not stumble into a world where commercial barriers, ruthless competition, sales numbers, and showbiz frenzy do not exist?

Within this imaginative sound playground, young Delilah could carve out a small lush lawn. English, born in 1990, with a rich ethnic resume, Delilah is an active member of the underground-alternative clique revolving around the electro-grime duo Chase&Status: in fact, well before releasing her debut album From The Roots Up, she lent her collaboration for the single Time and contributed as a songwriter for both emerging and established artists and producers. Delilah is not merely one of the latest graceful voices chosen to enrich—for purely commercial purposes—a big house-techno-dubstep track and the like (Guetta and company as a teacher), but rather a young girl who has chosen the path of classy pop, meticulous in details rather than in capricious artifices, rich yet without aesthetic aberrations, compact yet devoid of sound distortions. From The Roots Up, released only a few months ago, is indeed an interesting creation of simple and balanced, yet multifaceted and complex pop, a mix of electronic, ambient, instrumental, R&B, trip-hop, soul, and ambient perfectly and mutually wedded in an original union that has nothing to do with today's cheeky glitch-glitter.

The album repeatedly finds itself lost in intimate-dreamlike moments with a soft and surreal atmosphere: Breathe alternates ambient improvisations and melodic R&B touches, Disrespect immerses itself in an ascetic sinusoid of tribal-synth climaxes, Never Be Another excellently marries soul classicism and electronic-trance modernism. Slightly saturated with unease and mystery is the gothic trip-hop composition I Can Feel You, encounters the funk-rock extensions of Only You, flirts with Adele-like minimalism in the solo piano ballads Tabitha, Mummy And Me and Cinnababy; ultimately, a great continuation is the ethnic-ambient spirituality à la Bjork exuded by the masterful pearl Inside My Love and the dreamlike-synthetic-tribal experiments for the dark Go and So Irate.

Dense, spicy, deep, varied, vast, and multifaceted, From The Roots Up introduces a potential future godmother of good music, still far from commercial explosion, hyper-million-dollar contracts, and the capricious whims and vicious habits of ten-figure pop stars. However, dear/good Delilah does not need the recklessness of a starlight to aspire to the title of queen of the golden corner of pop, of that rich corner of wonders simultaneously ignored and flattered, excluded and sought after, exiled from the top 100 and admitted to the coveted table of quality.

Delilah, From The Roots Up

Never Be Another - Breathe - I Can Feel You - Shades of Grey - Only You - Inside My Love - 21 - Go - So Irate - Love You So - Insecure - Tabitha, Mummy and Me - Cinnababy - See You Again - Disrespect.