One of the outstanding releases of the year and one that is truly like no other, a song cycle that looks at a subject matter in depth and weaves a whole records worth of material around that theme. Every song here belongs specifically to this project, one that began after Leyla McCalla was given a composition commission from Duke University in North Carolina. The focus of the new work was to be Radio Haiti, a broadcaster from the Caribbean country with a reputation for uncovering political corruption whose journalists had been repaid with persecutory, torturous, sometimes fatal retaliations or expulsion. Leyla’s approach to this was not to document incidents in a dry chronological manner, instead this piece fizzes with life because she uses the seed of the idea as a blank canvas on which to take a deep dive into Haitian music culture in a quest for deeper understanding.

Part of this immersion is the vocals, which she primarily sings in Haitian Creole, the French based dialect of the country’s natives. It is also in the ambience of the sound, Leyla has made her mark previously as a superb purveyor of traditional sounding American folk with old time blues roots poking through that lend her work a surefire emotional punch, but on ‘Breaking The Thermometer’ there are also underlying textures of sunshine and Tropicalia as enticing African and Spanish rhythms rise and fade throughout. McCalla brings personal memory to the table too, especially in a stunning cover of ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by formerly exiled Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso, someone whose music she recalled from childhood and maybe sowed the seed for the sounds further explored here. Across the whole album, vintage clips of voices on old Haiti Radio broadcasts bring both a sense of history to the presentation and a glue to the whole song suite.

And yet, amidst all the found sound, voice samples and short instrumental passages that knit the work together, when we land on the conventional songs every single one of them is a highlight. ‘La Bal est Fini’ is a rousing number, propelled by a heavy shuffling rhythm and an unrelenting banjo pulse, elevating to the stars with Leyla’s impassioned singing on the chorus. The song ‘Vini We’ is simply beautiful, Leyla oozing with sincerity and compassion when she sings the words “they wonder why I love you, they wonder how can this be. I’m here for you like you’re here for me”. Underneath it all you see, Leyla McCalla is fast emerging as one of the essential songwriters performing in the folk and roots arena, this album simply underlines the fact.

Buy a vinyl copy of the album here: https://www.discogs.com/release/23742284-Leyla-McCalla-Breaking-The-Thermometer