The ever-expansive observer, funk-fusion chanteuse Georgia Anne Muldrow is, to have eccentric rhymesayer Mos Def tell it, “like Flack, Nina Simone, [and] Ella, she’s something else. She’s like religion.” In the year since The New York Times quoted the erstwhile Dante Smith, Ms. Muldrow has indeed become a sort of religion in genre: post-modernly post-funk. Soundscapes from Earth itself, airy loops plucked from a wide morning azure above, high-hearted and hyperconscious warbles alive with life and light. She is all of this and more. And yet, there is something deeper in Muldrow’s celestial resonance: a planetary knowing, a psychedelic humanness and realism in her presentation. Calls of “be yourself” and “never throw your dreams away” actualize a wonder and optimism in her music, a feeling of knowing and not knowing, of certainty and uncertainty in an age of post-humanism. Muldrow is a seeker, a journeywoman adrift in truth: her truth, our truth, some grander, perhaps Godly, truth. It is all very muddied and slippery at times. But, it is not so much her inability to foretell particular truths, because she does succeed (quite well, actually) in exacting universal truths with her idyllic trills and spacious, finite beats. And that’s just it with Kings Ballad: Muldrow’s wonderfully flighty reverberations allow the listener to grow, to mature with her, to continually learn and blossom and thrive through the music. Sort of like, well, religion.

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