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Amanda Abizaid’s upcoming album “Back To Love” will take you, as it did me.
I can’t get “Take Me”, the opening song of Amanda Abizaid’s new album, Back to Love, out of my head. The blend of moving but muted beats, her voice pregnant with excitement, and the quietly sophisticated arrangement embracing heart-probing lyrics just sticks in my mind and my ears. It sticks almost too much because I was so wrapped up in the first song, it took a few days before I moved on to the rest of the album. I am certainly glad I did.
I have been following Abizaid for over 5 years, so I know what she is capable of in rock, love songs, ballads, Middle-eastern arrangements, blues. I loved her last album, Walking in Twos, released in 2017. With Your Love has exceeded all of what I thought I knew about her talent. Written over the past two years with Lindsay Neal Gillis, with three of its songs released in 2020, she has created a collection that dives deep into her life . She sings the harshly real, but emotionally addictive “Please Don’t Forget Me”, and the hypnotically seductive “With Your Love” that flows with her smokey silk-smooth voice, and “Follow Me Back To Love” with delicious anticipation moving to a soaring fulfilment.
She brings her pain and strength to the album blended with her feel for nostalgia in “When I Walk Away”, as she sings the lines: My heart aches/When I walk Away. You can see her, feel her, cry for her. Then she moves to a cover of Radiohead’s “ Creep” that morphs from tinder and beguiling to soaring and captivating – totally stunning.
Abizaid wraps the album with an Arab version of “With Your Love”– she is part Lebanese, as well as part Mexican, and thus, multilingual. As the final notes of “With Your Love” in Arabic float away and the replay kicks in, I am back to the song that has never left me, “Take Me”. Amanda Abizaid has certainly done that with this album, and she will take you too.
Patrick O’Heffernan
“Take Me’, “When I Walk Away”, and “Creep” available now on Spotify. Full album to be released on Spotify and Apple Music Jan. 13 with a release party at LA’s Federal Bar on January 28. Pre-save at https://fanlink.to/backtolove_album . https://amandaabizaid.com/
