Album Review: Layla Kaylif – Call Of The Yoni

The complexities of history, sexuality, and religion are forever present on Call Of The Yoni, the fourth studio album from Layla Kaylif.

Layla Kaylif is an English-Arab singer-songwriter who studied Arabic at Oxford, and made a global impact with her single, Shakespeare in Love. From that pop beginning, her music has embraced that mix of influences and painted them on a gigantic canvas, as you can hear on Call Of The Yoni.

‘Yoni’ is a Sanskrit word, one with both a literal meaning, referring to the physicality of the womb; it also embraces a wider concept, one of femininity and life, and wider again in terms of the balance of the masculine and feminine in the role of creation, and ties into the Hindu pantheon.

That meaning within meaning nature ties strongly into Call Of The Yoni, as each track concentrates on love, belief, and the relationships between both, be they sacred or sexual. From there, it feels best to look at the album as a whole, other than its final, staggeringly inventive number. Kaylif has stated that the album explores the nature of the 7-in-1 woman, looking at aspects she refers to as “innovation, eros, sovereignty, spirituality, roots, sight, and transformation.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the lyrics of each track, from album opener and title track Call Of The Yoni right through to penultimate cut Night Journey, can be read as interpretations of elements of sacred texts, from The Vedas to The Bible and beyond.

And as Kaylif highlights here, as much as those are read within religious contexts, they also have highly sensual passages and stories, embracing sex and sexuality in a positive way. And that too is a constant presence on the album. It’s a brave collection of songs as a result, one open to interpretation and possibly misinterpretation, but then, isn’t most art?

The final track on the album is both a tribute to a great artist and a testament to Layla Kaylif’s creativity. She keeps Hallelujah near enough to its original time signature, one that originated in gospel and folk traditions, but translates it into Arabic, and the arrangement wraps classical, pop, and Arabic musical themes around it.

What makes that song such a mainstay of modern culture is how it’s open to interpretation – a love song, a message of warning, or a call to prayer. And from outside her own work, she finds in Leonard Cohen a fellow spirit – an individual trying to find their place in the world, balancing faith, desire, and temptation; wanting to be good, as nature beckons otherwise.

I’d categorise Call Of The Yoni as a faith album, though not about one particular belief system; there are those references to the Abrahamic religions, but the yoni predates those and comes from a very different cultural setting.

The album is also about centring the many roles of womanhood, from lover to mother to holder of the mystery of creation on earth. The male gaze imposes a pantheon of aspects on womanhood, and Kaylif counters that majestically on the album’s fusion of European and Arabic pop and classical references within the arrangements.

Call Of The Yoni was released on the 27th of March via Paper Garden Records. The album can be streamed on Spotify and YouTube Music – for more streaming options, head to Layla Kaylif’s Instagram feed. The album is also available to download on Bandcamp.