REVIEW: Charlotte Blu — High on My Feet (SINGLE)
A jazzy groove is the first element we make contact with in the new single “High on My Feet” from singer/songwriter, but as the track continues forward, it becomes clear just how minor a component the beat is in this performance.
URL: https://charlotteblu.com/
Rather than trying to surround us with a lot of percussive prowess, as has been common among a lot of the players putting out neo-soul pop singles this year, Blu is a lot more conservative with the construction of the bottom-end in this performance, granting us a much closer look at her harmonies than a lot of similar artists would have been comfortable with.
Despite her indie status, this is a musician who has the confidence of a major label artist in her delivery, which on its own is enough to make “High on My Feet” an interesting listen. Truth be told, the magic is just beginning here — by the time we reach the halfway mark in this performance, she has control of an arrangement that is bigger than the mix can even hold, and yet her disciplined attack can keep us engaged with the narrative like few others in her scene can.
There’s a light feel to the bass here that compliments the tone of the vocal quite well, and it’s presented so obviously that I don’t believe we were ever meant to tune into anything other than the harmony between the components. The seamlessness of this arrangement lives by the buoyancy of the chemistry between elements, and from what I can tell, Charlotte Blu put a lot of energy into making this as whole a work as possible long before she stepped into the recording studio.
This isn’t an artist who wants to try out different methods in search of what works best for her profile; as it’s presented in this release, she has a firm hold of her swagger and the narrative she’s building, which puts her much closer to mainstream appreciation than the vast majority of artists who she is competing with going into 2023.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/high-on-my-feet/1630544718?i=1630544723
She’s cool, calm, and collected where it matters the most, and if we’re only getting a preview of what Charlotte Blu is going to be doing in the future here, she’s going to have an easy time acquiring the attention so many of her peers have been struggling to attain on their own in 2022. 2023 is poised to be a big year for the neo-soul movement, and judging from the output that Blu offers up seemingly with little resistance in front of her in “High on My Feet,” she has the capacity to take the hybrid themes of this movement to another level that hasn’t been experimented with nearly as much as it should have been at this point in the history of pop music.
The underground has got plenty of talent as the New Year comes into focus, but if you want a song that encapsulates the ease of old R&B and the confidence of something younger inside of a 3:23 song, “High on My Feet” is where it’s at.
Colin Jordan
