Kindness should be fundamental to our being. But it's increasingly a battlefield, as respect for who you are and who you want to be is riddled with political landmines, trolls both online and in the streets and people who judge your worth based on gender and race alone. The Chicago-based artist, poet and activist Tasha wants you to be kind to yourself and others, and makes music in kind that feels like a quietly stoic challenger to a beastly world.
After a self-released EP — which first came to my attention via Laetitia Tamko, the primary singer and songwriter behind Vagabon — Tasha is ready to share her debut album, Alone at Last. Genre fluid like Lianne La Havas and Jamila Woods (who took Tasha on tour last year), with decorative-but-unobtrusive guitar work and electronics, Tasha roots her songs in a conversational poetry that hits like heart pangs.
Tasha's voice glides over a sashaying rhythm in "Kind of Love," something like a bedroom-recorded bossa nova. With the excitement and uncertainty that comes with gushy new love, she's eager to find a word that describes "falling into someone's sigh." It's a hopelessly romantic song, and Tasha is quick to acknowledge the difficult time in which romance feels distant. "Tenderness they're first to take / So tenderness we find / Bring your sleepy bruising bones / I will kiss them fine," she sings, offering a loving exchange that disrupts this world and finds a new one.
Alone at Last comes out Oct. 26 viaFather/Daughter Records.
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