Giving Love an R&B Workout

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, California, 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 LP are the others, the ones where she conveys weakness, vulnerability and self-awareness.

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.”

Thefactthatkehlaniisasstraightforward aboutherunreliabilityasherdesiressetsher 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 productionduowhohavecollaboratedwith Alessia Cara and Britney Spears — she mines the 1990s, from the hip-hop swing of groups likeswvandbrownstonetotheearthierapproach 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. Sometimes she loads up her measures with extra words, sometimes her words spill past the formal boundaries of the measures. That slight disregard for structure lends her songs urgency. The effect is enhanced by Kehlani’s seeming hunger for vulnerability across the board, and her eagerness to use this album to showcase the voices of other women willing to be as frank as she is. It opens with a spoken-word poem (by Reyna Biddy), and several songs begin with snippets of conversation from some of Kehlani’s intimates — friends and also her grandmother — talking about relationships and the vagaries of love and trust. Taken as a whole, it feels as much like a conversation as an album, as much confession as boast. NYT