San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Music
The singer serpentwithfeet performs at the Swedish American Hall.
There’s a direct connection between “Blisters” — Josiah Wise’s first EP under the name Serpent with feet — and his just-released fulllength debut, “Soil.” It’s the title track of “Blisters,” a beautifully descriptive song about love lost that is distinctively black and queer in its lyrics and sounds. It stands out from the others, however, not for its melancholy but for its particular forcefulness. “The same dew that falls from my mouth/ And cause the hairs on my chin to trill/ Could nourish you, could sustain you/ Kiss me, or go/ Kiss me, or go/ Pretend the floors cracking in the shape of our names/ It’s not a big deal.”
“Blisters,” was a crowd favorite when Wise would perform the song on stage, he said recently over the phone from Brooklyn. He loved it, too, for the stomps, the claps, the melodrama and the specificity. When he began to conceptualize “Soil,” the album bringing him Tuesday, June 19, to the Swedish American Hall, he leaned into “Blisters.”
“This will be my arrow. I’ll use this as my arrow,” says the New York singer. “‘Soil,’ the album, is like the grandchild of ‘Blisters’ the song.”
With “Soil,” released June 8, Wise appears to have discovered new ways to play with a voice and sound that he’s spent years refining. His blend of influences — gospel, R&B, classical music — are present as ever. But there’s a sense that this time around, he’s made himself, and his music, more physical, too.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this growth is “cherubim.” In it, Wise weaves together drums, stomps, keys from an organ, shivering beats and, of course, his ethereal vocals, which he layers so thickly they sound as rich as the surface of an oil painting. His lyrics are exuberant and raw, using the language of devotionals to talk about his love for a man.
“Boy, every time I worship you/ My mouth is filled with honey/ Boy, as I build your throne/ I feel myself growing/ Sewing love into you is my job.”
“It’s the wildest song I’ve ever written,” he says. “It’s the wildest song I’ve ever dreamed up. And it’s something I didn’t know I’d be able to do now.”
He means this in many ways. Wise was caught by his ability to be so emotionally open and present. “It’s not so much a gimmick or a selling point, it’s just true,” he says. “It’s been really important for me to express desire and express it in different ways.”
But musically, Wise also put all of the pieces of the track — vocals, keys, drums — together. “I’ve just never made anything that knocks like that,” he says. “It was really scary to work on.”
For Wise, that’s no small victory. The 29year-old known as Serpent with feet — the man who has a pentagram tattooed right next to the word “HEAVEN” on his forehead, who frequently puts glitter in his beard and carries dolls around with him — first started singing when he was 6, in the choir of his family’s Pentecostal church in Baltimore. Years later, he started formal training, where they frequently encouraged him to drop his vibrato (something that feels so essential to his sound now, it’s hard to imagine him without it). He kept following that path to the University of Arts in Philadelphia where he, again, formally studied classical music.
But as much as gospel was a part of him, as much time as he devoted to the classics (samples of those works still run through his music), each were constituent parts; neither was the whole of him. Wise has said he was always interested in creepy things. The occult, too, has clearly influenced him. But the reason, he says, has more to do with thoughtfulness than aesthetics.
“I think maybe in every society you need people who are going to interrogate,” he says. “I think to some degree everybody wanders and wonders, whether we’re loud about it or not.”
It took some time for him to take all these disparate influences and mold them into something that felt genuine to him, but that’s exactly what “Blisters” represented and what “Soil” continues for Serpent with feet. In both the EP and the full-length, Wise is loud about his wandering and wondering.
“I’ve seen black people be all of themselves,” he says. And he wants the same. “I wish to embrace everything that makes me me … using all my experience to help me discover who I am.”