Category: r&b
-
blood orange – four songs EP
This EP contains four more songs of the expected output from Blood Orange. That would be a better title. While Four Songs is enjoyable, airy, easy to digest, I do have a complaint: it’s inarguable. There are so few edges, it resembles the hand sanitiser that fails to sink into your skin and leaves an […]
-
sudan archives – natural brown prom queen
“I’m not average,” says Brittney Parks, a lot. Natural Brown Prom Queen has a confidence proportionate to the Ohio native’s vision. The instrumentals don’t merely embody her celebratory themes, but urge them further, like a tennis match in which both players secretly support themselves and the opponent. This is as clarified as neo-soul, hip-hop, or […]
-
jockstrap – i love you jennifer b
Jockstrap had an EP out a couple years ago—the fantastic, but altogether unsettled Wicked City. While the duo’s experimentalism has since been ironed, edged, ILYJB nevertheless emerges with oddities of epic proportions. Moments of tender enlightenment burst through the jagged cracks: the tracklist is technically sharp in the vein of a classical song cycle, soft […]
-
beyoncé – RENAISSANCE
The question upon each Beyonce release is: what will she do differently? 2016’s brilliant ‘Lemonade’ posited, with its varied feature list, that a ‘genre’ is simply where you choose to stand in the one-room party of music. The attitude of six years ago has run down to 2022 like a choppy river. ‘RENAISSANCE’ is expectedly […]
-
sam dees – the show must go on (1975)
Sam Dees just missed the mark—not in any tangible way (the title track is a little cloying, but that’s about it). A prolific, soulful songwriter behind Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, Dees enjoyed a somewhat silent success. His name in solo terms is generally associated with soul aficionados frantically spitting the words “that’s great, but […]
100 words 