Music Review: Nostalgia

Album: Nostalgia
Music: Annie Lennox, Universal Music
Rating: 4 Stars
The latest album from British singer-songwriter Annie Lennox harks back to a time when swing was heard on street corners. Singers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone recorded songs in the 1930s-1940s that are still recreated today though many of Lennox’s tracks include songs composed by white men.As part of pop duo Eurythmics, Lennox ruled the 1980s with her mix of soul and synthesisers. To record Nostalgia, the nearly 60-year-old singer watched clips of recordings by Carmichael and the Boswell Sisters to under the ambience of that era. She brings it to life with a complex theme but bare piano settings.
The nuances are there but the arrangements aren’t as dense. Lennox is a vengeful woman in Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s I Put a Spell on You, a free spirit in Johnny Green’s I Cover The Waterfront that has a flugelhorn solo, flirtatious in Carmichael's The Nearness Of You and buoyant in Holiday’s God Bless The Child. George Gershwin’s Summertime gets a reinvention for the noughties. Her collection of sincere renderings of mid-20th century classics is a pleasurable walk down memory lane for the mature listener and a great way to connect to the past for the uninitiated.