In the thirteen years since she released her last album, Gabriella Cilmi kept her toes in the world of music. She released an EP in 2019, after the brief All Kings and Queens side-project with her brother Joseph, and last year toured alongside Delta Goodrem and The Corrs Down Under.
The time away was enough for the Italian-Australian singer-songwriter to reconnect with herself and her musical roots, with the resulting album, ‘Pure Love’, leaning into her love of soul, jazz and rock, and her distinctive, husky vocals carrying the 10-song set of blues rockers and tender ballads.
So there’s an instant sense of triumph on opening track and title song ‘Pure Love’, as she vows over a thundering live, organic instrumental to let go of the past and step into the future: ‘Take me back to the time when the lines had never been drawn / On second thought, cut the chord to it all.’
This time around, there’s an ease in the material that no doubt comes from Cilmi exploring territory that’s shaped her musical instincts since she was a youngster, growing up in Melbourne in the 1990s and 2000s, in a home filled with everything from her uncle’s Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin albums, to blues and soul standards on her mother’s Chess Records compilations.
Aptly, it’s a video of Cilmi, aged 10, performing ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ that ignited her spark to return to the recording studio this time around, with that vigour clear in her vocal performances on the roaring ‘YRU Hanging Around’ and Motown-leaning ‘No Apologies’.
It’s a sound more aligned with her global breakout hit ‘Sweet About Me’ and as far removed as one can get from her follow up LP, the electro-pop heavy ‘Ten’ (‘On A Mission’, ‘Hearts Don’t Lie’), much of which she’s since admitted she “had no say in” and “didn’t identify with”, and led in part to her taking a step back from the industry. She deals with the backlash to standing up for herself on tracks like ‘No To A King’ and piano ballad ‘Too Far Gone’, being told ‘no one will touch you now you’re done with me’ and ‘it’s not very ladylike to put up a fight’, and asking: ‘Are we too far gone to hear the notes we’re playing?’
This time around, she knows exactly where she’s at, with a confidence that radiates the most on piano ballads like ‘You Killed Our Song’ – a tender cut about a song that’s forever associated with a person from the past – and the apocalypse-inspired ‘Love Me Like It’s The End Of The World’, both of which strip back the instrumentation and allow Cilmi’s vocal to carry the storytelling.
Recorded at Middle Farm in Devon with producer and musician Pete Miles, the live to tape approach delivers a tight, cohesive record that spotlights her songwriting and reestablishes Cilmi as a one of contemporary pop’s most distinctive voices.
