Afarin Mansouri - Dancing With Love [Centrediscs]

Scheduled for release via the Canadian Centrediscs label on October 20th, 2k23 is "Dancing With Love", the second full length album effort conceived by Toronto-based and Iran-born vocalist x composer Afarin Mansouri. Over the course of twelve brand new compositions and a total runtime of roughly 55 minutes we see Mansouri, alongside a plethora of contributing fellow musicians, drawing strong inspiration from her personal fears and victories and especially the taboo around female singers and musicians she experienced in her home country before immigrating to Canada more than two decades ago to follow her passion, further study music, especially Opera, and finally grow and become a fully fledged artist herself. This being said, and with some of the vocals even inspired by Iranian poetry from the 10th century, Mansouri presents an emotional and musically wide-ranged journey from the crackly and vintage sounding opener that is the title track "Love Is In The Air" which evokes memories of revue shows of the 1940s and the cinematic efforts to emulate those on screen to the Classical x (Neo)Classical arrangements of "Astonishment", the classic Opera references in "Omnipreset", the tender whispers of the Balearic-infused "Endless Sea", the dancey and jubilant arrangements of "Hope" as well as the most obviously Oriental x World Music inspired cut that is "Alchemy" just to lay out a rough sonic spectrum of what this impressive sophomore album has to offer, even for those who aren't deeply familiar with any one of the genres mentioned. Consider this a gateway drug which could lead to further explorations of the field.

Album artwork on Instagram!