Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums.
Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. (Or rather, some might say all the jazz greats had the pleasure of working with Ella).
This album is a great demonstration of this, the swing in the fullest sense demonstration.
After spending years away from music to renovate buildings and make films and visual artwork, Adult.'s Adam Miller and Nicola Kuperus couldn't have picked a better time to return. During the years between 2007's Why Bother? and 2013's The Way Things Fall, the kind of dark, spiky, synth-driven sound they'd been honing since the early 2000s – back when it was called electroclash – finally rose to prominence, making them seem less like outliers and more like trailblazers. That distinction seems even more fitting considering that Adult. have moved on from the wild-eyed noise-punk of their previous album on The Way Things Fall, which wears its accessibility as boldly as the duo took no prisoners before.