Olivier Laurent’s new concept album, “Solin Anj”, doesn’t so much play for you as it does around you. Listening feels like an act of accidental espionage on a life in progress. We are placed in the sonic womb, hearing the muffled arguments, ambitions, and affections of a world getting ready for our arrival. It’s an album that unfolds with the unhurried, jazzy cadence of a late-night confession, pulling from a lineage that includes Digable Planets and Mos Def, but the concept is entirely Laurent’s own peculiar, brilliant creation.
We overhear the foundational tension of our future father’s life: the rejection of a nine-to-five normalcy his “Mama said I should’ve been an accountant” for the lonely path of artistic integrity in “Sold Out.” We then feel the warmth of our parents’ connection, from the microscopic devotions of “Konpliman”—that little snort in her laugh—to the messy, magnetic friction of “I Like It.”
These moments of domesticity are startlingly real, especially when they curdle. The gut-punch declaration “I love you but I don’t like you” from “Out Of Spite” is the sound of a storm raging just outside our shelter. It’s the kind of honesty you’d only hear through a thin apartment wall, unfiltered and raw.
But the gravity of the album pulls toward one event: our own becoming. The title track, “Solin Anj,” is the sound of the world shifting on its axis, a panic-tinged reckoning with a new, beautiful weight. Yet it all resolves in the stunning clarity of the closer, “For A Long Time.” Here, Laurent redeems past demons and “thoughts of a suicide” not with an easy platitude, but with a profound new purpose. His child becomes his “greatest verse,” the anchor that makes all the previous struggle seem like necessary prelude.
It leaves you wondering about the muffled soundtrack that played before your own life began. What arguments, ambitions, and love songs were you built from?
