Even if you’ve picked up on any of singer-songwriter/pianist Arjuna Oakes’s previous offerings, it’s unlikely you would have predicted the scale and ambition of his debut album ‘While I’m Distracted’. Not that the New Zealander’s earlier EP’s lacked flare or impact. His first release ‘The Watcher’ from 2019 stirred things around with its exquisite blend of sultry soul-jazz which led to LA Indie label Innovative Leisure snapping up the much-praised follow ups ‘First Nights’ and ‘Final Days’. Here was a lush new voice making eclectic pop without fear or boundaries, laying the foundations which underpin the ‘While I’m Distracted’ soundscape.
The debut album has seen the London-based Oakes switch to that city’s very own Albert’s Favourites as a new home although his close collaborator Serebii (aka Callum Mower), producer, beat-maker and sounding board on those first EP’s, remains a crucial contributor. Oakes and Mower have a friendship made way back as session players, touring Aotearoa in a surf-rock band. From this world of twang and tom-toms they’ve intriguingly evolved into a partnership which makes singular music that skirts easy definition. ‘While I’m Distracted’ therefore feels like a culmination of their phase one and a signpost to their next destination, a voluminous, unabridged double album of soul-jazz seeking excellence where layers of electronica, soundtrack grandeur, smooth funk and even post rock shadows converge.
It’s an expansive proposition from the get go, the space age ambience of So I don’t Forget granulating softly into a gently padding house piano pad and looping choral shivers. This leads you onto the immense, shimmering beauty of Nothings Gonna Fill You Up, where Oakes’s low-key vocal entry is spine tingling. It’s a steamy, night streets/lost love epic, nu-soul dream music with emotional, quivering strings, subtly propulsive beats and wafting sax curls. A cut that’s in sync with Axelrod sonic dramas.
There’s certainly no limit to Arjuna Oakes’s musical topology. No Joke gushes with ideas, a song which takes any tangent it pleases. Beginning almost vaudevillian on a Tom Waits down-beat trudge, Oakes’s voice slides between a crooner’s warble and a more scuffed and edgy earthiness. The song takes surprising twists from hazy trip-hop to sassy r n b, and onto a nu-jazz swing. “Take me to that fateful day it all changed for me” Oakes sings as the synths get spooky and the track descends into an eerie Serpent With Feet conclusion. Then there’s Before It’s All Over where the reversed beats slap and jangling guitars crank up into a rootsy Fat Possum/ Black Keys work out, with the added cloak of 4AD sub-gothic voices to throw you off any over-familiar scent.
Such quirky experimentation and delicate disruption also fills Pocket Full Of Paranoia, disturbing the broken beats and old soul hook with bubbling psychedelic loops while Harrison Scholes burbling bass cranks up the desperation. “All the shit that I devour holds a gun up to my head” Oakes tells us in an urgent falsetto. It’s a reminder of the lyrical depth and insightfulness which is fundamental to his work. Oakes is digging into identity, loss, separation, hope and isolation in his song-writing with a natural voice in place of faux-poetry. Perhaps this is most striking in the more pared back tunes like the bravely honest ballad Lay Low, where he admits “I am cursed with the weight of a dream I will never find”, or on the raw exposure of the acoustic Get Me Some Grief.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an Arjuna Oakes recording without some warming jazz-toned vibes. Catch Me sees him following a more familiar song structure, comfortable in that cosmic soul-jazz vibe he’s developed with co-producer Serebii. Meanwhile The Love That I Feel redresses a sultry bossa into a contemporary, typically nu-London sound with smoochy sax, slippery warm toned guitar and some cascading keyboard fluency echoing Ezra’s Joe Armon-Jones. Oakes also brings the funk with an easy going pazzaz. Motel has one eye on Thundercat and the other on Defunkt with its nimble bass fills, clenched horn stabs, angular melody and a pin-sharp guitar break from Jo Jenkins.
‘While I’m Distracted’ may on the surface feel weighty but it never sounds self-indulgent. There’s very little filler here. Even I Am Alive, a power ballad with all the usual ingredients, gets elevated by a stark lyrical bite. “I check for a pulse so I know I’ll survive” and “so much is lost to the hollow screams” are snippets which remind you that Oakes is chasing a different moment. Ultimately though this is an album of shifting highlights: the astonishing vocal expression of the intimate No-one; the infectious rolling closer Mallet Groove where Oakes and band stretch out before drifting off symphonically; and the elegant completeness of Won’t Let This World Break My Heart, all synth arpeggios, restless rhythms and a Cinematic Orchestra dreaminess.
Arjuna Oakes has made a massive leap with ‘While I’m Distracted’ but it’s a set which comes across as being significant without drowning in self-importance. In interviews he’s said that he wants his music to “ask questions rather than give answers”. Well here’s an album that will keep you inquisitive and involved for a long time to come…
Get your copy of ‘While I’m Distracted‘ by Arjuna Oakes from your local record store or direct from Albert’s Favourites HERE
