CAMILLE KU’ULEI SALLAVE: Affaire de Cœur

If last year’s debut from local singer-composer Camille Ku’ulei Sallave was marked by its stylistic breadth and seemingly ever-changing pace, her latest, Affaire de Cœur, is imbued throughout with an after-hours jazz-tinged ambiance.

Landing somewhere between early Rickie Lee Jones, jazz-era Joni Mitchell, and Sade, all six songs on Affaire de Cœur move at a slow, measured pace. The feeling is languorous, often dreamlike, and not so different in pacing from a William Faulkner novel.

If the meter is fairly consistent, the specific styles of the songs change up, albeit not as much as on last year’s outing. “Faded Red Door” is a jazz-adjacent ballad, with a sparse backing of strummed guitar and strings behind Sallave’s warmly intimate vocal. “North of You” is of a similar style, opening with a slowly percolating passage on guitar and double bass before Sallave joins in on vocals.

A banjo opening on “Pepper Tree” gives a countrified feel to that number (Jeff Berkley continues adding both strummed and picked passages on banjo throughout), while “Clearly Not” has a bright, modern jazz arrangement, and is the sunniest song on the collection, with a story of a budding romance (and a pair of sparkling solos by guitarist Josh Taylor and bassist Doug Walker).

Sallave’s crystalline vocal on “Ms. Misunderstood” continues the lighter feel of “Clearly Not,” at least musically.

The album closes out with “Porte Rouge Délavée,” the opening track with French lyrics.

Throughout, the musicianship is top shelf. The band consists of Taylor on guitar, Berkley on banjo, Walker on bass, and Josh Hermsmeier on drums. They create a shifting, shimmering back group for Sallave’s beautiful singing.

Every song being performed at roughly the same pace is a much different experience from the sonic smorgasbord of her last release. And none of the five songs (the first and last tracks being the same composition, but with lyrics in English and French) has the immediate accessibility of tracks like “Angels Share” or “Biscuit” from Camille’s Confessions Vol. 1.

So it’s a very different listening experience, yet equally rewarding in its own way, introducing a more introspective side to her composing and singing.