‘ Accidental’ pop star hits a groove
“Can someone tell me why I always seem to let these straight boys run my life?” Shamir sings on his new album, “Revelations” ( Father/ Daughter). The Las Vegas- born singer has never fit in, musically or otherwise, and after the fickle twists of pop stardom that changed his life in the past couple years, he’s addressing his perpetual misfit status headon in his latest batch of songs.
Shamir Bailey’s 2015 album, “Ratchet,” turned him into an unlikely star — one who crossed lines of gender and genre with electro- pop that managed to be both danceable and introspective. Yet earlier this year he found himself without a label and on the verge of dropping out of the business altogether.
“I was gonna quit music this weekend,” he wrote in April. “From day 1 it was clear I was an accidental pop star.”
That statement coincided with the self- released “Hope,” which brimmed with low- fi recordings a world away from “Ratchet.” Now with a new label home, Shamir turns “Revelations” into a raw rock- folk record that evokes his early days in the Vegas indie scene, when he made the rounds as an unconventional country- pop singer and played in an experimental rock band.
Shamir always said the house- inf luenced production on “Ratchet” was more his producer’s idea than his own, and it’s clear that the low- fi sound of “Revelations” — rough- hewn guitar and keyboards, crude drum machines — is closer to how he envisions himself as an artist.
On the opening “Games,” the singer’s voice is a cry of disappointment and a music- biz commentary over a sparse keyboard: “I don’t have much to offer you but my soul, my heart, and everything I’ve been through. But you just see the green.”
As a lifelong nonconformist, Shamir has earned the ache in his voice, its falsetto purity countering the Pixieslike grime of “You Have a Song” and the rinky- dink drum machine of “’ 90s Kids,” a would- be anthem for his fellow millennials.
Musically, “Revelations” affirms that Shamir has regained his gift for crafting hooks, which went missing on “Hope.” “Blooming” channels the syncopated pop of the Ronettes, and there is a Caribbean breeziness to “Astral Plane.”
The closing “Straight Boy” serves as a bookend for “Games”: Both are songs that use Shamir’s music- industry travails as a platform to address a world that would turn him and his fellow misfits into the blind mute depicted on the album cover. On “Revelations,” he serves notice that his sound and vision have returned intact.