Submitted photoBenjamin Clementine, "At Least For Now."

“AT LEAST FOR NOW”

Behind Records / Capitol Records

Benjamin Clementine sings the chorus of “London” — one of the better songs on his debut album, “At Least for Now” — as if struck by a painful flash of insight. “London, London, London is caaaaalling you,” he urges, opening the throttle on his voice. “What are you waiting for, what are you searching for?” He goes on this way awhile, then lands on a quieter note of a resolve: “I won’t underestimate who I am capable of becoming.”

Clementine, a Parisian bohemian of London origin, is dead serious about that vow. “At Least for Now” is his declaration of selfhood, an album very much about the act of becoming, with a tightrope balance of dramatic artifice and diaristic detail. “I’m sending my condolences to insecurities,” Clementine sings on “Condolence,” a bittersweet anthem in which he also reflects on his own birth, declaring: “So when I become someone one day/I will always remember that I came from nothing.”

A singer-songwriter and pianist with a knack for expressionist outpouring, Clementine, 26, has a striking backstory — as a self-taught musician and poet, a busker on the Paris metro, a rambler on the streets. The acclaim that has greeted him in Europe surely has something to do with his persona. There’s no way it couldn’t, given how deftly his songs build on it, even as the arrangements involve a chamber string section, and his narrative voice toggles between first, second and third person.

As for Clementine’s actual voice, it’s a strange and frequently stunning instrument, a bladelike tenor that can swoop into either a clarion cry or a guttural scowl. The inevitable comparison, notably on a song like “Adios,” is to Nina Simone .

Clementine holds fast in his songs to an experience of alienation that’s exceptional, unique unto himself. However callow his thinking, it does make for good material. In “Cornerstone,” another standout track on the album, he sings of being “alone in a box of my own,” and learning to savor such conditions: “It’s my home.”

— Nate Chinen, New York Times