“I keep trying to start the…start the…” murmurs L’Rain at the opening of her fourth full-length album, the experimental musician, songwriter and singer finding a way in through staticky, unreal mists. Starting is the hardest part, we will agree, but the artist solves the problem by jumping right into what feels like the middle, the lush, multi-layered textures of “with time,” which conjures Sade and DJ Shadow, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Burial. Which is to say, it is as enveloping as classic 1970s quiet storm soul, but with an edgy, sample-writhing, electronic complexity.
L’Rain’s voice is strong and assured, often fogged in with hiss and rattle and synth sounds, so that the easy part is following the melodic line, the hard part making out how it wanders through uncanny valleys of sound. “blue,” for instance, wraps choral surges of pure vocal beauty in stuttering beats and heavily effected trombone blasts, the mess and overload of it as integral as the straight line of tuneful-ness.
The single, “soulless cycle” places L’Rain amid a hall of mirrors, her voice reflected and refracted until it comes from every side at once. The mix turns violent, bludgeoned by battering drums, subsumed in a vortex of faintly samba-scented street celebration. A cloud of noise sits atop the mix, the clarity of keyboards overwhelmed by its barely penetrable fury. And yet there is beauty and clarity in even the most overstuffed of these tracks. You just have to listen harder to hear it.
The song that veers closest to the soul that filled the radio waves in the 1970s and 1980s is “birthday” a rim-shot clacking, jazz-guitar wreathed, downtempo ballad that dispenses (mostly) with electronic manipulation, It comes at you straight and lovely and not detectably ironic, with Minnie Riperton-style ghost flourishes and Roberta Flack-like grace notes. It’s very nice, but if you find yourself longing for layers that rub against each other, throwing off sparks and noise and contradiction, flip back to “glass ceiling,” just as pretty but more inscrutable. It’s the mystery that makes the magic.
