Brenda Carsey's triumphant Sophomore album is here
Brenda Carsey is a Los Angeles-based vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. Her career has led her through choirs, orchestras, and marching bands. Her repertoire of sounds also includes soul, jazz, rock, pop, folk, hip hop, electronic groups, cabaret stage shows, and various other solo projects making her a true veteran with a wealth of knowledge and experience that have shaped her into the kind of musician that could probably fit anywhere in music. She's also been featured as an instrumentalist and vocalist on many projects in partnership with Netflix (Babysitter’s Club, Better Call Saul, Tiger King The Musical), The Voice, Joy Ride (award-winning short film), Rapture (Versa Media show), as well as on albums by Whitney Tai, Cesar Saez, Phoebe Silva, Kid Lightning, Clark Chimp, and Feral Kizzy.
Cognizance is a state of awareness or knowledge of a thing. In the case of Brenda Carsey's long-anticipated sophomore album, "Cognizance" specifically refers to a state of self-knowledge and self-awareness that comes after introspection and personal growth derived from diverse (and often unpleasant) experiences and teaching moments - "Character Development" as folks online have begun calling it.
The first time that I heard anything by Brenda Carsey was back in the middle of 2022; her then-new single "Just Trying To Do my Thing" had come out and I was enamored instantly with her back-to-basic-and-beyond sound. The song teased us with an upcoming album featuring an ensemble of world-class musicians running the gamut of R&B, Soul, Jazz, Prog-pop, and even a little bit of rock - all of it entirely composed and arranged by the expert hand of Brenda Carsey herself.
From start to finish, "Cognizance" is a love letter to many genres, but more importantly to the collaborative effort of orchestral production. The vast majority of the sounds you'll hear in this album were written down by one person and then performed by another on an instrument that they're an expert in, and if you think about it, this is becoming an increasingly rare occurrence in today's musical landscape outside of the Rock/Metal sphere. When it comes to most contemporary R&B/Soul music, it seems that most artists opt for a post-modern vibe more akin to electro-pop than to what the roots of their genre actually sound like; this is not a point of criticism but a mere observation that leads up to the biggest selling point of Brenda Carsey's new album: It's filled with excellent musicianship through and through.
Brenda is a fantastic and evocative songwriter, and it suffices to take a look at tracks like the empowering "Rebel Walls" and the spellbinding folkish anthem "Goat And Bull" to realize just how richer her lyricism is when compared to many of her more terse and repetitive contemporaries. She weaves acerbic narratives about heartbreak and victimization (Unfortunate Men) just as easily as she contemplates her own moments of wavering ("I'm Sorry"), and then she assaults us with a dreamer's lament (This Damn Place) or an uplifting victory anthem ("But You're Alive").
The journey to release "Cognizance" hasn't been without its hiccups, part of the provenance that makes the name of the album so ultimately meaningful. As the story goes, back in 2017, shortly after releasing her debut "Solitary Refinement", Brenda began writing what would eventually become "Cognizance" for a period of about two years, launching a very successful IndieGoGo campaign to fund the studio time needed, this, however, would come to clash with the COVID pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, delaying the technical process up until April of 2021, where Brenda would go on to recruit some of L.A's finest musicians for the task, these are Kyle Crane on drums, Bassist Nick Campbell, Michael Day on the guitar, Rebecca Schlappich Charles on the violin, Celloist Jean-Paul Barjon, Jonah Levine for the trombone, Trumpetist Leider Chapotin, and David Otis blowing the alto saxophone. All thirteen tracks of “Cognizance” plus the extended live-in-studio bonus track (only available on the vinyl record version of the album) including all instruments, vocals, scratch tracks, and over-dubs were tracked in just 9 days.
Meet The Author
Samuel Aponte is Venezuelan-born raised and based.
I joined Rival Magazine after a few years of doing PR work for independent musicians of all stripes; understanding their struggles to be heard in a sea of constant ADHD noise and paywalled access to platforms, I now bring a willingness to always appreciate and encourage the effort and creativity that artists put into their work . Can also find some of my writings on LADYGUNN and We Found New Music