Lovely difficult

"Lovely Difficult is a plausible extension of Andrade's preceding release, Studio 105, whose Lennon-McCartney and Serge Gainsbourg covers, and a flagrantly poppy duet with Hugh Coltman signalled things to come. The singer's Cape Verdean roots have not entirely gone missing here ... But there's no anxiety of influence, reflecting a childhood spent between Cuba, Cape Verde, Senegal, Angola and Germany, perhaps, ultimately landing in Paris, so many little flavours assimilated, jazz, rock, chanson, strings, blended and blurred along the way. The redeeming element is Andrade's capacity to ramble through it all with a winning ease ... In the most haunting of tracks, Simplement, Andrade's smoldering langue-et-parole slithers around a rooted bass line and an endlessly looping minor three-chord acoustic guitar vamp, an evocative manifesto of less as more".