Halfway through Azniv Korkejian’s gorgeous debut album as Bedouine comes an abrupt shift in tone. While the rest of the record dazzles with sweetness—“like a lamp in the light of day/Drowning in summer rays,” as she puts it—the centerpiece is a haunting protest song. Born in Aleppo, Syria before moving to Saudi Arabia and eventually landing in Los Angeles, Korkejian wrote “Summer Cold” in a moment of despair. The lyrics reflect her reaction to news that American-made weapons had fallen into the hands of Syrian terrorists. “I don’t want anything/Ever to do with them,” she sings, using her wise, fluttering voice to convey a sense of anxious fear. The song resolves with a cycle of found-sound samples she recorded at her grandmother’s home, making its previous verses feel at once more vivid and more distant, the way a nightmare lingers after you wake up.
“Summer Cold” is an outlier on Bedouine—an album more successful at sustaining a mood than reacting to any moment in time—but it’s indicative of the depth in Korkejian’s songwriting. Recorded for the Richmond, Virginia label Spacebomb, Bedouine is backed by full horn and string sections, lending it a similar fairy-tale whimsy to Natalie Prass’ self-titled debut. Still, Korkejian’s songs retain their natural intimacy, with arrangements that, at their most ornate, feel like impromptu daydreams in the minds of their narrators. In the swooning “Dusty Eyes,” she dreams of city lights and lost love as the music builds in intensity, as if to match her lovesick fantasies. In moments like these, Korkejian’s work as a music editor for films (most recently The Big Sick) becomes evident: Her songs gain resonance equally from her lyrics and the sheer sound of everything.
The sound of the record is exquisite, breezing through about 40 minutes with an effortless charm. “I will try my best/To keep my head nice and quiet/For you,” Korkejian sings sweetly in the opening track, a subtly powerful song about our instinct to maintain an air of perfection in relationships. The moments on Bedouine that break through that pleasant veneer are welcome, whether in the stark realism of “Summer Cold” or the moody imagery of “Back to You.” Over creeping Hissing of Summer Lawns jazz-pop, Korkejian places herself as an outsider in the city, where people “talk in exclamation marks” and lead “lives so designed.” Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music.
Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album. “Solitary Daughter” is a direct line to the conversational inflections of early Leonard Cohen. In its verses, she sharpens her vocal style into a rougher spoken-word delivery, stretching out her words and landing on each rhyme with metronomic precision. She takes a similar approach in “Heart Take Flight,” the album’s finest, subtlest track. As Korkejian gives her heart permission to soar away, the music remains decidedly earthbound. Her words are accompanied only by gentle fingerpicking and a lonely array of distant horns, letting each image bloom in your imagination. “Everything around me is/Exactly as it should be,” she sings, “I feel so free.” It’s a contagious feeling, one that Azniv Korkejian seems fully prepared and grateful to share with the world.
