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In theory, the making of Celeste’s second album should have been plain sailing. Boosted by a win in the BBC Sound of 2020 poll, and her single A Little Love appearing on the John Lewis Christmas ad the same year, her debut album Not Your Muse entered the charts at No 1, spawned two big hits – Stop This Flame and Strange – and ultimately went gold. That’s the perfect starting place from which to make a second album: success, acclaim and attention, but not on the kind of overwhelming scale that seems ultimately paralysing, where it’s impossible to work out how you can follow it up.
And yet, the making of Woman of Faces has clearly been attended by some difficulty. Celeste has talked openly about butting heads with its producer, Jeff Bhasker, whose hugely impressive CV includes work with Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and Kanye West: she commissioned string arrangements from British composer and conductor Robert Ames, but Bhasker “didn’t let me use [them]”. Last month, she was on Instagram, protesting that her label was showing “very little support of the album I have made” and had threatened to drop her entirely if she “didn’t put two particular songs” on its track list. This accusation caused a certain degree of eyebrow-raising, not least because Celeste is signed to the same label that singer Raye complained about in 2021, insisting they had refused to allow her to release a debut album: Raye subsequently left the label, released the album herself to vast success and noted that record companies might be better served allowing artists to “always create with a sense of purpose, rather than the means to sell”.
It’s hard not to think of that remark when you listen to Woman of Faces. It’s far from a fanbase-confounding left turn – a Metal Machine Music for the jazz-inflected pop-soul set – but nor is it hugely commercial. Its sound manages to be both sumptuous and stark. Its opulence results from its orchestrations and modern classical flourishes – the piano introduction to People Always Change is a dead ringer for Opening, the first movement of Philip Glass’s 1981 chamber piece Glassworks. But there’s something austere about it, too. Its emotional tone is sombre; songs deal with the societal pressures placed on women and the deleterious effect of technology on our lives, and the overwhelming theme is the fallout from a broken relationship. The pace is glacial and there is an almost complete absence of drums: aside from a brief rattle of martial snare during On With the Show, the first time a rhythm track appears is on the penultimate song, Could Be Machine, a brief and joltingly uncharacteristic explosion of fizzing electronics and stomping double-time beats with a lyric that you could interpret as being about anonymous trolls, social media bots, AI or all three (whichever it is, Celeste is very much not in favour).
Sombre, glacial, austere: it’s not an easy sell, and it’s unquestionable that the music on Woman of Faces often feels at one remove from the rest of mainstream pop. You can draw a line between Time Will Tell and the darkest ballads in Amy Winehouse’s catalogue, but the album’s contents frequently sound closer to prewar vocal jazz, the French chanson réaliste tradition and the stuff of the old-fashioned West End showstopper than anything from the 21st century. It’s not hard to imagine Keep Smiling floating from the jazz clubs of New York’s 52nd Street. On With the Show takes a theme that runs through modern pop from Gene Pitney’s 1966 hit Backstage to Taylor Swift’s I Can Do It With a Broken Heart – the performer putting a brave face on their misery – and returns it to the wings of the London Palladium.
It says a great deal about how potent and beautiful these songs are that they never sound like genre pastiche: the pace at which they proceed works with Celeste’s voice, giving her room to display its nuances, her command of phrasing and enunciation, her ability to gradually build from something close to a whisper to full power and push her vocal to a point where it feels it might break, before pulling back.
But if you had to pinpoint a flaw, it’s that the album’s near-uniform pacing and tone make it a challenge to consume in one sitting. It might have benefited from more disruptive tracks along the lines of Could Be Machine, or indeed Everyday, the standalone single from earlier this year that sampled Death in Vegas’s guitar-heavy Dirge. This is a problem, given that Woman of Faces is clearly intended as a song cycle, to be listened to from start to finish. That said, every song is individually stunning – excerpted on a playlist, they would stop you dead in your tracks. In that sense, at least, Woman of Faces feels like a thoroughly modern pop album.
This week Alexis listened to
Smerz/They Are Gutting a Body of Water – Big City Life
From an album of reinterpretations of tracks from Smerz’s acclaimed Big City Life, intense Philadelphia shoegazers They Are Gutting a Body of Water turn the title track into something contemplative and magical.
