#Multisim blue full
‘It Was Good Until It Wasn't’ is her second full length album, arriving three years on from ‘SweetSexySavage’, and here there’s a star-studded list of collaborators and producers along for the ride, helping to facilitate Kehlani’s most ambitious writing to date.įrom the sterile ringing at the start of Toxic onwards, you can feel that the album’s title is going to reflect its contents: things are about to become introspective and sobering.
#Multisim blue tv
And as a musical statement, it’s Kehlani casually, unhurriedly, staking her spot in that next year, or more.Since the release of her ‘Cloud 19’ mixtape in 2014, Kehlani has parlayed early hype and a start in TV talent shows into continued growth as a musician and songwriter, grappling with love and loneliness as the primary themes behind her work. Like Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” already a 2010s standout, it’s the sort of mood that could suspend itself over a day or month or year. From the intro’s running-water sample (echoed in her lyric: “holding water, slips right through your fingers”) to the fluting, unresolved melody, it sounds almost ephemeral. … I’m more aware that this isn’t just my truth.”) By far the highlight is lead track “Footprints,” compared (deservedly) by Pitchfork to Joni Mitchell. “But now I’ve seen how people reacted to my song “Honey,” or when I’ve used the correct pronouns and put women in my music videos. “I’ve been making music about women my whole career, but I never felt the need to write ‘she,’ necessarily,” Kehlani told Fader last year. (The subject, too, is clearly an ex- girlfriend, the pronouns most specific on the album’s most prominent song. Kehlani’s voice sounds soaked in pain on single “Nights Like This,” a plaint to an ex-girlfriend. Where the ballads on SweetSexySavage were very period-accurate-in that they were often filler-on While We Wait they’re the standouts. It’s also by far the album’s best rap verse While We Wait has more features than the nearly all-Kehlani SweetSexySavage, but the guests acquit themselves best when they’re subsumed into the mood, like neo-soul throwback Musiq Soulchild and a relatively chill Ty Dolla $ign. But it’s cheerfully executed, with unexpected details-a little percussion skip here, a Kehlani rap verse there. The hooks remain sparkling, with by far the sparkliest being “Morning Glory”: a riff on “if you can’t handle me at my…” with lyrics just short of cutesy (“I may look like oh me, oh my”). “Feels” evokes Ne-Yo’s “Miss Independent,” and the percussion track to “Footprints” is practically Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs-it could be pasted atop “Bills, Bills, Bills” with little hitch.
That said, the millennial R&B callbacks haven’t gone away. It’s the sort of album you’d spin out of the lyric, “I’m a fountain of youth, raised on Arie and Badu,” as Kehlani sings on “Morning Glory.”
If SweetSexySavage clung to its TLC predecessor just a tad too tightly, deployed its ‘90s R&B samples a bit insistently, While We Wait has different aims. The lyrics dwell in what Briana Younger, in The New Yorker, called a “perpetual state of indecision and emotional disrepair … captivating in part because there no neat conclusions,” and the music does likewise. Her own work, meanwhile, is more languid and relaxed, less a bid for airplay than for her fans’ quietest hours. (It may be worth noting that all three of those artists share the same label, Atlantic, as Kehlani.) She’s also often the best part of those singles, particularly when you get down the list into wait-whos like KYLE. In the years since SweetSexySavage, Kehlani’s kept her voice on radio via guest verses on singles by Cardi B, Charlie Puth, and others. Kehlani, like many women in modern R&B, has struggled to break into both urban and Top 40 radio despite excellent, poised solo material. At first, the tape appears more conversant with the past couple decades’ neo-soul and quiet storm than this generation’s brash, fewer-fucks-given crossover R&B. Her new mixtape, While We Wait, recorded during her recent pregnancy, is half the length of 2017’s SweetSexySavage and twice as wistful, as if delivered through a sigh. Everything she sings comes off a little like a conspiratorial secret, one she’s bursting with excitement to share. Yet no matter how overlush the arrangement, her voice always pierces through: high, poignant, and disarmingly frank. At her best, like 2016’s “Distraction,” there’s virtually no space between them, sounding like one continuous, flowing chorus. Kehlani Parrish is very good at what she does: hazy, deceptively ethereal R&B tracks from which hooks bubble up as clear and plentiful as raindrops on glass.
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