Solange Knowles’ hazy vision
L'univers évanescent de Solange Knowles
When I Get Home, le dernier album de la petite soeur de Beyoncé.
Solange Knowles, la petite soeur de Beyoncé, vient de sortir son quatrième album. Enregistré entre les États-Unis et la Jamaïque, When I Get Home fait la part belle au jazz, au hip hop et à l’électro. Un critique du Guardian nous donne son avis sur ce nouvel opus.
The credits for Solange Knowles’ fourth album are long and impressively varied, offering up a supporting cast that includes everyone from Pharrell Williams to John Carroll Kirby, Gucci Mane to actor Debbie Allen. But one credit sticks out, because you see it over and over again: “All lyrics and melodies written by Solange Knowles.” In a pop landscape where even confessional singer-songwriters require a team of coauthors in order to bare their souls, here is evidence that Knowles is cut from a slightly different, more auteur-like cloth. No assistance is required from blue-chip LA writing teams, or former indie stars turned hacks for hire.
YOUNGER SISTER
2. Knowles has thus far triumphed against the odds by doing her own thing. Life is seldom kind to younger siblings of superstars who enter the business – they’re almost invariably doomed to toil in their shadow – but Beyoncé’s younger sister has succeeded in establishing herself as an entirely separate entity: weirder, artier, more given to staging interdisciplinary performance art pieces at museums and galleries than blockbusting record-breaking world tours.
3. Certainly, no one who listens to When I Get Home is going to confuse it with a rapacious grab for mainstream success. What initially sounds like an impressionistic intro piece, “Things I Imagined”, is gradually revealed to set out the album’s stylistic stall: an electric piano plays jazzy chord changes, Knowles repeats the title over and over, the vocal melody mutating, vintage synthesisers float and burble, and the whole thing doesn’t so much end as unravel and peter out. It’s both very beautiful and very hazy. 4. The latter becomes a problem as the album progresses. The songs frequently sound like jams or extemporisations on a theme, where melodies float away vaporously or get stuck in repetition. Despite the fact that virtually everything lasts less than three minutes, there’s a sense that the tracks are rambling on a little.
A MUSICAL CONCEPT
5. On one level, there’s nothing half-formed about When I Get Home at all: it’s self-evidently the work of an artist with a clear musical concept. You can tell by the way the guest stars and famous coproducers don’t impose themselves on proceedings at all – most of the time, you barely notice they’re there, so subservient are their talents to Knowles’ overall vision. And as a mood piece, an ambient album, When I Get Home works really well. There are lots of intriguing ideas here. But it’s an album that feels like it’s hovering rather than actually heading anywhere, diverting rather than impactful.