Perhaps only D’Angelo and Erykah Badu have incarnated R&B with such effortless magnetism.
Categories
aaliyah – aaliyah (2001)
Category: r&b
Categories
eddie chacon – sundown
‘Sundown’ is a low-flying, night flight of a record.
Categories
ana moura – casa guilhermina
‘Janela Escancarada’ is a gorgeous opener. It captures and bottles the dreamlike state of mind Ana Moura has slipped into. Despite her melancholia, Moura is careful not to detach. Her music anchors itself to the port of tradition while embracing new world musical goods: the vocal “yee-hees” above an accordion on ‘Andorinhas’ are indelible. In […]
Sound is like Water is so low-resolution it almost seems provocatively weak. It chuffs along at the level of a first draft that has rested in a downtempo dabbler’s private soundcloud account since 2015. There’s a presumption of humour in dreamcastmoe’s lackadaisical style, but it never once clicks. Imagine talking to someone who is constantly […]
Gaelle had a lot on her mind in 2004, or maybe it was one omnipresent thought. Either way, one hundred words might be too few to list the genres she brandished on her sole full-length release. Gaelle’s stunning house shines through padded kicks, nocturnal moods, and, later on, longing piano licks. The R&B and neo-soul […]
Anohni and Billie Holiday seem, in a brilliant scientific experiment, to have been welded together and strategically placed inside Jacob Lusk. The charismatic, warm instrumentation from Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope coats the extraordinary vocals like a weighted blanket. Rather than shifting errantly, the tracks glide between flight paths in motions so smooth they’d force […]
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 […]
“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 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 […]
100 words music reviews 