KELELA CONJURES THE PAST
SOME DEBUT ALBUMS CATCH YOUR ATTENTION WITH A CATCHY SINGLE OR A NEW PLAY ON AN OLD MUSICAL STYLE. OTHERS, LIKE KELELA’S ‘ TAKE ME APART ,’ FEEL MORE IMMERSIVE, LIKE ENTERING AN INTRICATELY AND THOUGHTFULLY CONSTRUCTED WORLD.
Admittedly, Kelela Mizanekristos isn’t a teenage newcomer on the brink. She’s 34 and has taken measured steps to becoming one of the year’s breakout R&B stars, having released a buzzy mixtape three years ago and added vocals to recordings by Gorillaz and Solange more recently. She wanted her first record to be interesting, both musically and lyrically. She wanted it to upend convention, too. The resulting set of songs is too elusive for easy genre description, and thematically, she repeatedly tinkers with gender tropes that have endured for decades.
The album’s title track serves as an entry point for the entire production. “Take Me Apart” isn’t a song reflecting a singer being undone by some other person. It’s a command.
“That’s a thread I wanted through the entire record,” says the singer, who will perform at White Oak Music Hall Tuesday night. “Typically, in songs, people battle hardship with more toughness. The flip of that is what I was trying to get across on the record. I didn’t invent it, but the idea of battling hardship with vulnerability. But to attack with vulnerability.”
The album’s narrative is framed between the flicking end of one relationship and the beginning of another. Kelela is equally frank about the physical and emotional content. The declarations are striking, time and again. “Could be winter, but I’m burning inside,” is a succinct summation of the quiet disconnect that can take root over time.
“I had to work hard to articulate that specific thing we do,” she says about the lyric from her song “Frontline.” “We want to spend more time with certain people, but I feel like I fail every time when I set this goal of knowing what my (expletive) is and what your (expletive) is. You start to cancel parts of yourself when you feel this immense amount of devotion to somebody. It’s a challenging thing to do, and I haven’t mastered it still.”
“There’s a place you hold, I left behind,” goes another line that requires no further explanation, the one that opens “Frontline.”
And another in that song bluntly expresses defiance and independence, while serving to counter decades of guys singing about their woes: “I ain’t gonna sit here with your blues.” Nobody wants to be the receiving end of that. “I worried about that line and any lyric that seems colloquial,” she says. “But you do want them to be familiar for people. That makes perfect (expletive) sense to me. You shouldn’t have to be a poet or do research to listen. So I try to sound familiar. Maybe somebody finds it basic. ‘I ain’t gonna sit here with your blues.’ But I think it speaks to a lot of experiences that women have.”
Kelela returns to a pair of motifs throughout the album. There are moments of falling — typically a good thing — and there are moments movement becomes cyclical — not a good thing. While the experiences are typically contradictory, they’re united, she says, in that “my approach to both is by trying to wear my heart on my sleeve.”
Like an expert filmmaker, she wraps the album with “Altadena,” the title referencing a Los Angeles neighborhood that falls between the city and a forest. “Where can I go?” she sings. No resolution found, just a provocative examination of the journey.
Musically, “Take Me Apart” is also a feast to devour. It sounds great blaring from speakers, but it also works well as a headphone album, the sonic nuances flourishing in the small space.
Kelela grew up in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, and the R&B of the era clearly left an impression. She’s also the child of two Ethiopian immigrants, so her cultural view was wired to be global.
She throws out admiring commentary about Janet Jackson’s work produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, as well as singers like Anita Baker and Barry White. But those singers are just a few of her guideposts. She’s sung jazz and metal during her career, all in an effort to figure out who she is.
And she doesn’t run from modernity. Key producers on the album include Jam City, an electronic musician from the UK, and Arca, a Venezuelan who is also innovative and electronic-minded.
For Kelela, the sound of the album is in part a response to the mainstreaming of R&B in the late’ 90s, when Disney-stamped acts like ‘N Sync and Britney Spears found their way to homogenized radio formats and the distinctions between pop and rhythm and blues melted.
“When white singers got permission to sing black, a new crop of radio stations popped up,” she says. “People say ’90s R&B. It used to be just R&B. But there was a desegregated pop radio moment, and I wondered what that meant for the future. It became quite evident to me that there was a noticeable commodification of the sound. But there used to be great variation in R&B, and people like Janet Jackson were part of that. What she was doing is really innovative in its time. So I find myself thinking about that a lot, trying to make bridges into different musical spaces with an emphasis on the writing.
“But really I’m just trying to make things that I think I’d like to hear.”