The solo debut from Alabama Shakes vocalist, songwriter and rhythm guitarist Brittany Howard, Jaime, is a musical cross-pollination of vintage soul, psychedelia and Dilla-esque MPC beats. I came to this album through the single Stay High, her beautiful, shuffling, lolloping, creaking alt-soul/new R’nB pean to love. Stay High’s aesthetic references old soul music — Howard digs out classic soul musical motifs like plucked orchestral strings and what sound like the prettiest little Jackson 5-ish xylophone melodies — and stitches them onto raw, lo-fi hip hop beats, with the seams and rough edges left unfinished. She continues and expands this approach here (Howard wrote all the songs and played guitar on all the tracks too), with a production that possesses a dusty, murky untidiness, the prettiness in her melodies arriving at the listener’s ears via a filter of distortion and overdrive, strained and taut. And obviously, at the heart of it all there’s her voice, with its sweet and smokey nocturnal tone and delectable cadences, sometimes placed in a stark, close up and minimalist setting, on other songs backed by cacophonous beats, grinding abstract sound beds and massed backing vocals. It’s the kind of record that somehow feels intimate, close, as though Howard was as close to the mic as she could be when recording, and somehow is as near to the inside of your speakers as she can be while you listen. A big, intense and impressive journey of an album.