Kindora Camp’s gorgeous voice goes beyond vintage or retro to unique
Kindora Camp: Is she vintage? Is she retro? One thing is for certain—her music beautifully captures a style of a bygone era. Think late-’80s/early-’90s R&B pop and you have a good fix on the sound. Mind you, this isn’t “throw-away pop,” easily dismissed. This is something far more substantial, a marriage of phenomenal production work and gorgeous vocal work to produce pop music with as much artistic gravitas as any singer/song writer.
She’s clearly very, very good at what she does. So what does she do? She isn’t old enough to be vintage and is too unaffected to be retro. No, I think the best term for Kindora is “New Old Stock.” She’s the authentic article, just 20 years in the future.
Camp has an album debuting on April 14, and it is chock-full of shimmering vintage synth sounds and a pop diva voice that will leave the hair on the back of your neck standing (unless you’re one of those neck-waxing types, in which case it will give you a frisson). That there is an ethereal quality to her singing should come as no surprise given the nature of her introduction to music.
As a very young girl, Camp believed there was a skeleton in the wall behind her bathtub and shared this alarming news with her grandmother. Grandma sagaciously suggested that “singing will keep the ghosts away,” and thus a star was born. It makes for a more interesting origin story than most.
I myself first stepped up to the microphone only because everyone else in my fledgling band was too shy. I’d much rather have “sung the ghosts away.”
Whatever got her started, Kindora clearly fell in love with singing, which explains how her YouTube cover of Portishead’s “Roads” caught the attention of musician Jimmy Sowell and producer Rock Floyd. Sowell convinced Camp that she had something worth pursuing and Floyd was the man behind the board, producing all of Camp’s solo material. A word on Floyd: I hadn’t encountered his work before hearing Camp’s music, but the guy is one hell of a producer. When it comes to this particular style of music, Floyd is easily one of the very best.
The album is Dark Continent and it is packed with 12 superlative tracks ranging from the radio-ready “Safe” to the straight-from-1988 “When I Wake Up.” This is an album equally at home in the car, the club, or the bedroom, and I can’t help but think that it would naturally increase your odds of a good time in any of those venues. It’s smooth, it’s sexy and Kindora Camp is the newest pop diva you haven’t heard of yet...but you will.
The album drops in digital form on the 14th, and in the meantime, feel free to swing by Kindora’s Facebook page to keep abreast of what’s up and coming.