Yet Goulding manages, majestically, jumping from the lush, ’80s-synth-clap-filled “Power” to the aquatic house of “New Heights” to the swampy, churchy soul of “Love I’m Given” to “Wine Drunk,” an “O Superwoman” rewrite if ever there was. When the twosome finish “Start” together, before the background of a nerve-wracking rubber-band’s twang, they’ve set an impossibly high, weird bar for the rest of “Brightest Blue” to follow. After Goulding intones dramatic lines such as “You can’t begin to understand the magic she had before you killed her” with a sinister quiver, in comes Serpentwithfeet’s cranky falsetto for a match made in… frankly, it’s matchless.
sorry what was the question?” sings an AutoTuned Goulding, rushing words like Drake, on the album’s first track, “Start.” While that cut is an airy mix of prepared pianos and stormy cloud sequences, it is Goulding’s voice, when mixed with that of the other-worldly avant-garde vocalist Serpentwithfeet, that is the stinger. “All I see is everything I’ve done called into question…. With all that, the double album “Brightest Blue” may be Goulding’s best and most complete work, a lovelorn mess of emotions atop a mass of vibrant soundscapes masquerading as atmospheric R&B and strange, contagious pop. In this regard, “Brightest Blue” is more of a textural extension of 2012’s alluringly spacy “Halcyon” than it is her last, more mistily acoustic effort, 2015’s “Delirium.” Here, Goulding and her oddball collaborators take their catchy pop hooks - often elongated and pulled like taffy - and extend that reach into nu-soul, all while giving the singer-lyricist room to present a sad page-turner of a diary, torn pages, missed connections and all.
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