I’ll never win the lottery but I seem to get lucky with music and I seem to get especially lucky with music performed by women. In a way, it could be seen as positive discrimination or it could just be God compensating me for the having to listen to a surfeit of the mundane. God is, after all a woman and her ways are indeed mysterious.
Anyway, enough of the asides. Abby Ahmad hails from New York City and “Curriculum” is the follow up to her debut album “The Rearview”. There’s the facts but what, I hear you say, about this album made my ears happy. Well, Ms Ahmad has been smart here and has made an album that intrigues you and draws you back to it. Her songs are pretty much what you would expect of a big city songwriter reflecting on the positive and not so positive elements of the urban jungle although she has a particularly neat turn of phrase whether she is being philosophical (“…there’s a fine line between what we want and what we can get” from “Borders”) or metaphorical (“…sweet tooth for agony” from “Habit”). That’s they special thing here – the realism. Her lyrics are gritty and realistic but her clear blue intelligence spins a web around the obvious and makes you wonder why you didn’t think of expressing things that way yourself.
On matters of musicianship, it’s all good here. The arrangements are clever and the supporting cast fit perfectly into the mix. Ms Ahmad’s voice is something of a curiosity – it’s not particularly distinctive but she seems to have a remarkable ability to adapt it to the song going, for example, all mainstream on “Lost on Me” and then raunchy on “Habit”. A lot of work has clearly gone into this album and I’d say that it was all worth it