Let’s Talk About Love

SONGS ABOUT love are often something of a lie — they tend to tell stories that are too neat, and to make saints out of their singers. Some basic tenets: Don’t admit fault, don’t admit that you got played, don’t give any credence to the inner narrative that might complicate the outer one.

There are a few songs like that on Sweetsexysavage, the first major label album from Kehlani, the Oakland R&B singer who, over the course of two self-released albums, has emerged as an idiosyncratic lyricist with discernible swagger. But the most striking moments on this refreshingly warm LP are the others, the ones where she conveys weakness, vulnerability and selfawareness.

Kehlani is wounded, and doesn’t mind telling you about it. On In My Feelings, a reinterpolation of New Edition’s If It Isn’t Love, she brings her broken self to the fore, asking an untrue lover, Why you be doing me scandalous?/you just assume that I’m strong and can handle it/why do you make me feel like I am less than my worth? On Keep On, which recalls the R&B girl groups of the 1990s, she documents a relationship defined by unhealthy patterns — her own: You can tell the world that I’m a narcissist/i would think they’d listen to you/’cause I ain’t been the best that I coulda been.

The fact that Kehlani is as straightforward about her unreliability as her desires sets her apart from R&B singers who treat the genre only as a site of cool seduction. Her choice of production is equally encouraging. Working largely with Pop & Oak — a songwriting and production duo who have collaborated with Alessia Cara and Britney Spears — she mines the 1990s, from the hip-hop swing of groups like SWV and Brownstone to the earthier approach of Groove Theory to the ethereal cool of Aaliyah, invoked here on Personal (which builds on Come Over, a song that became a posthumous hit for her) and Undercover, which harks back to her early work with Timbaland and Missy Elliott.

Kehlani has an athletic voice, though not an especially powerful one. And so she leans harder on words — which ones to pick, and how to deploy them. Sometimes she loads up her measures with extra words, and sometimes her words spill past the formal boundaries of the measures. That slight disregard for structure lends her songs urgency, and in places makes this album feel more intimate than just a collection of songs.

Taken as a whole, it feels as much like a conversation as an album, as much confession as boast. NYT