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Dec 13, 2024 Web Exclusive By Jim Scott

On Small Changes—his fourth full-length, and first since his Mercury Prize-winning Kiwanuka five years ago—Michael Kiwanuka continues to seemingly pluck songs from the ether, creating music whose strongest impression is that of déjà vu. No one working currently feels more tied into the history of music in a natural (or preternatural) way.

As he’s progressed, Kiwanuka has shifted away from machine-made sounds, leaning more heavily on his luscious voice and barer instrumentation to carry the listener along. The gorgeous “One and Only” recalls Jeff Buckley at his most reverent, with a glistening guitar and tapping drums accompanying vocals that are somehow freighted with both fragility and trust. “I hope you realize,” Kiwanuka sings, “Memories are the compromise / We need to feel alive.”

Perhaps it is the presence of those memories, but there is a patience in Small Changes that doesn’t exist often in music full stop. It seems born partially of jazz, but also of prog rock and shoegaze and some of the noodlier of genres, a willingness to see where things will go, to follow them to their conclusion, logical or not. It’s contained in the spacy breakdown of “The Rest of Me” and the downtempo pleasures of “The Lowdown (part i).” Many of the songs feel like sections clipped from a larger jam. Not that they feel incomplete; they feel as though they belong to a larger fabric. None of the tracks even drift into five minutes, but their sound conjures an expansiveness that’s near limitless.

This all adds up to an album that feels like it’s been discovered as opposed to made. It never feels labored or grinding, merely plucked from the stars. Nothing about Small Changes grabs one by the lapels, but all of it is worth paying attention to. (www.michaelkiwanuka.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10