Rating ★★★

Author: Nick Hasted

New York-based Dutch singer Aerts’ third album exists in a parallel dimension to most releases, exploding with extra-musical ambition. Aerts has had parallel careers as a clinical psychologist and choir conductor, and creates chocolate-based art with her pastry chef husband, a CV which has led to this album being sold with chocolate bars which benefit the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Femmes du Virunga female cacao farm collective, and helps replant its rain forest. It was, meanwhile, recorded remotely with a mind-blowing assembly of over 100 female musicians from more than 40 nations, with the intention of battling the music business’s gender imbalance.

Even sans chocolate bar (and an LP booklet with a cacao-pulp cover), the music is worth hearing. Aerts is a disciple of pianist Kenny Werner and has a decent jazz background and a strong, pleasurably pure voice to carry songs combining elements of cabaret and 1970s singer-songwriters, Manhattan Transfer and Marvin Hamlisch, with a wry romantic core.

‘You Are My Morning’ is a dreamy ballad reminiscent of the softer side of Lennon and Ono’s Double Fantasy, Aerts making clean, creamy climbs before Ella Joy Meirs’ high, whistling harmonica solo. Just as you’re settling into the middle of the road, ‘The Way You Touched My Hand”s dark shudders and sour swoons of strings create a more avant-garde, broken torch song. Chamber pieces vie with Congolese soundscapes and Cuban bolero, art songs with choral harmonies and vocalese. Aerts is ethically grounded, and aesthetically off the wall.