Next up, a flip of a song you likely know well…
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[6.67]
Katherine St Asaph: A SoundCloud R&B singer with some great starting material — namely, a crackly sample and interpolation of, respectively, the piano line and conceit of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black.” Not sure it gets that far past the starting material, but in a world where J. R. Rotem is successful I’m more than OK with the less cynical counterpart.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Too woozy and too static to sustain interest at almost four minutes, but when she mumbles “from back to black” she reaches several years back and nods to Amy Winehouse.
[5]
Will Rivitz: One of the countless things that makes Burial so compelling is that, despite the fact that his tracks consist almost entirely of treble and bass with nothing in between, his music still feels full. Listen to a track like “Endorphin,” for example: the hollowness that might be expected in the vast chasm between overwhelming bass and glassy upper-register synths simply does not exist, our brains filling in that chasm as we might with a visual blind spot. We don’t notice anything missing, despite an absence of a couple thousand kilohertz in the low vocal range. “Black,” despite sharing Burial’s penchant for patchwork collagery, has the opposite problem: despite frequencies that just about span what we can comprehend, the song feels insubstantial. Maybe it’s the bass, filigree when rock-solid probably would have been more appropriate; maybe it’s the sampled piano riff, winding its way through seemingly arbitrary low-pass filters which cut off both actual and emotional resonance; maybe it’s the drums, shuffling stiffly through riffs that can’t unpin it from some sort of mechanical corset. Whatever it is, despite Akilah’s phenomenal vocal performance, it feels artificial, inhuman, and incomplete.
[4]
Iain Mew: I spend 80% of “Black” wishing she had a better production to work with, or at least one without the tinniest drums ticking away at the edges. Yet the moment when she gets to “it’s all a formality, you know it too” and everything falls apart completely, slicing and sliding away around her, almost makes it worth it
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Akilah comes in with heavy, sooty vocals breastroking through the jangling piano, nearly invisible bass and jutting, chaotic drums, then hops out of the water, rapping as she shakes off the chlorine and bullshit.
[10]
Ashley John: The work of healing is thorny and meandering. The swelling tide of time comes with the reminder that everything that happens to you, happens to you forever, inescapably. Akilah doesn’t know the answer to how to move forward or get better, but she doesn’t pretend to either. When the pain carves out holes in us there is no proper filler, just the promise of a new growth over which we have control. “I’m not going to reclaim what you took from me,” is a motto for 2018, to tend to the gardens we plant ourselves and leave the rest behind.
[9]