Seamlessly traversing pop, soul, jazz and dance music, the LA-born, London-based singer-songwriter Brendan Reilly makes a return to his soul-jazz roots with The Life of Reilly. Having toured and performed with the likes of Basement Jaxx, Disclosure, Florence + the Machine, Laura Mvula and Rita Ora, it's great to finally hear the Manhattan School of Music graduate over the course of his first full-length album. It gets off to a blistering start, with Reilly penning smart new lyrics to the Wayne Shorter classic, ‘E.S.P.’. As a founding member of BLINQ, featuring fellow vocalists Liane Carroll, Ian Shaw and Natalie Williams, Reilly knows all about layering vocal harmonies to dazzling effect, as illustrated here in a brilliant, unaccompanied take on the Jobim/Buarque song ‘Retrato em Branco E Preto’. A number of impressive co-writes includes ‘Win You Over’ (with Eska Mtungwazi) with its supremely catchy, syncopated piano vamp in the verse, ‘Higher’ (with Neil Thomas), one of several tracks to feature Reilly's extraordinary falsetto, ‘Famous’ (with Gwyneth Herbert), which wittily documents an artist's uneasy relationship with fame, and ‘How to Forget’ (with Tom Cawley), which possesses the power of a Brill Building classic. As a showcase for Reilly's multifarious talents, this is just about perfect.