Kelela - Raven (2023)

ilken and surprisingly sunny, Kelela's long-awaited third
full-length distills her ineffable essence into poetic,
horizontal lyricism over murmured afterparty bumps and gaseous
post-club ambience.

It's on 'Missed Call' that "Raven" begins to fully unravel. A
very different album from its predecessor (2017's universally
acclaimed "Take Me Apart") it hums like sulfur after a firework
display - pink and green and blue becomes grey and yellow. When
a near-invisible airhorn punctuates the fade-out of 'Let It Go'
signaling a fresh mood, it's the memory of a fleeting high
that's all but slipped away. A featherlight dancehall thud
underpins Kelela's gossamer vocals; "Baby, you've been gone for
so long," she coils and we hear it, loud and clear. The
DC-raised artist has always shied from convention. On her debut
"Cut 4 Me" she embraced Night Slugs and Fade To Mind's gaseous
club construxions pre-empting (and informing) a wave of
similarly-angled soundalikes. Its follow-up bundled these ideas
into a more ambitious album format, leaving an aesthetic
breadcrumb trail that led to both "Homogenic" and "The Velvet
Rope" and wider stardom seemed pretty much guaranteed. But
shortly afterwards she almost completely vanished from social
media, taking the time out to breathe and read and listen and to
figure how to represent her reality authentically - she did
what so many artists struggle to, and took stock of the
situation. So that first balmy pad that hovers into earshot on
'Washed Away' is a sharp release of breath, as if someone's
just pressed play on a dormant CDJ. "The mist, the light, the
dust that settles the night," she cries over a backdrop that
threatens to mutate into Drexciya's 'Andreaen Sand Dunes' but
never does.

Where its predecessor was guided by Jam City, Bok Bok and
Arca's byzantine dancefloor anomalies, this album pulls its
energy from alternative spaces. Kelela's revealed that 'Contact'
- an aerated breaks-led kiss that sounds like 'Inner City Life'
with the heat cranked up and the speed pulled right down - was
dedicated to chatter speckled pre-gaming, and the
psychedelic-erotic moments in the club's darkest crevices.
Other moments, like the sunbleached, 'Teardrop'-hued 'Fooley' or
'Holier', with its drowsy electric piano reverberations and
evolving drones, sound as if they're lashed to the experience
of the afters, when the sun's cracking thru the curtains and
noetics weave tired minds into mystickal, musical lattices.
She's still plugged into the club experience, but is able to
provide a more four dimensional perspective, and this time it's
NYC-to-Berlin techno pin-up LSDXOXO whose presence is felt most
prominently. He handles a handful of ambiguous club-not-club
melters, like the soaked and dissociated 'Bruises' and the
phantasmagorically nostalgic early single 'Happy Ending', while
Nguzunguzu's Asmara adds a breath of polished restraint to
tracks like 'Let it Go' and 'Contact', and Toronto head Bambii
provides a hopeful pulse that draws from her hierarchy-free
understanding of club music, whether it's baile funk and
ballroom or footwork and rap.

Kelela's first full-length was a mixtape - a decade later she's
absorbed its lessons and some of that pacing into a body of work
that speaks to the club experience without attempting to
function simply as club music. If a track like 'Missed Call'
works at the dance it's a bonus, not an expectation - it's music
whose purpose is chameleonic, hissing through crackly earbuds on
bus rides just as well as it blares through expensive
soundsystems amalgamated with chaotic substitute rhythms. She
also smartly acknowledges the omnipresence of downtempo shades
that encircle the scene, looping in textures and granulations
from producers like Berlin's Yo van Lenz and Florian TM Zeisig.
On the title track, soft-focus analog purrs from London's Fauzia
guide Kelela's acrobatic voice into distorted FM bells and, in
time, a Basement-ready kick roll from NYC's Acemo. Kelela
straddles two worlds, letting her words serve as the bridge
between memory and experience, the event and the essential
aftercare. After 'Enough For Love' rebuilds the '80s
electro-ballad as Afro-Brazilian-inspired R&B, with decadent
keys placed between sounds from São Paulo's Badsista, 'Far
Away' floats us off into the horizon - wherever that might be -
washed over by a reprise of the weightless opener. Self-care is
an awkward, leaden concept, but with "Raven" it sounds as if
Kelela's suggesting an equally transportive alternative - a
place where interaction can lead to satisfaction, even love.
Keep your guided meditation, this is healing music.