For those who find the passage of time a one-way process of attrition, here"s good news for you. In the eight years since AZITA"s last long-player, her fevered brain has barely rested, and the proof is a new album of unbounded physical and mental activity, music and entertainment, entitled Glen Echo. The worlds of the previous AZITAs have left their unmistakable essence. Her singular conception of pop music - the idiosyncratic songs, singing and playing that have graced seven acclaimed releases - is in verdant recurrence on Glen Echo, blossoming anew, cutting sharply in the spirit and image of her ever-evolving, always questioning style. AZITA is, on a very forthright level, a formalist - whether standing the lines or vaulting turnstiles, she"s aware of the proscribed limits to her endeavors. That doesn"t mean she"s gonna heed them so much as add "em to the considerations of her art. Writing and arranging on keyboards since the time of her solo debut, AZITA focused on guitars for this set of songs. Not simply for swagger or a fresh approach to soloing, but as part of a way to elide expected singer-songwriter tropes, to democratically populate the sound-stage in equal partnership instead. This is a key aspect of the Glen Echo sound, one that determined another new choice - AZITA playing everything on the album herself! That"s the best kind of democracy. Previous long-players Enantiodromia, Life On the Fly and How Will You? were achieved via close work with players and engineers who took the compositions from the demo to a finished form. Invariably though, something would get lost in the transmigration somewhere. With Glen Echo, AZITA comes through fully, jaggedly, most vividly, owning her intention entirely in the dialogue of singing and playing her rock and rhythm and blues. The lyric sheet is riddled with language that circles, through the many moments of life, aspects of the passage of time, the preempted dreams and strangeness of the present and the way we invent an idealized past in response to the changes, guiding the narrative...where? It"s all banded together by AZITA"s wit, equal parts droll and dire, her dispassionate view of fates and outcomes for all of us here together on the planet, textured with unique, cinematic details and sudden dives into a deeply felt, utterly OG sense of soul. In Glen Echo are a multitude of sounds - all the moments in a life: the good time grooves, acerbic exchanges in the street, shifts in community and generosity, moments of loss you know you will carry forever, reflection upon unknown futures and pasts, the dark recesses late at night that echo with a wonder you"ve never felt before. You name it, AZITA"s got some sweet and sour theme music for it. You"ve left it now, but it"s where you"re from. Take the trip back to Glen Echo - a once per lifetime getaway - fresh springs and summers of ten years ago, or an autumn eve when you were a kid. Or maybe it"s just a synaptic distortion, subbing for what your eyes pass over in the present season. Feel how you want about it, it doesn"t really matter to us; any wind that blows AZITA back into the game is a well one!