When we look back on 2018, will we see it as the year in which albums became shorter? Is that where music is heading? A whole lot of records dropped this year under the 35-minute mark. I couldn’t tell you why. But it’s proved a trick difficult to pull off. For some, Young Fathers on Cocoa Sugar, the short length allows for a harder punch, a condensed mode of expression responsive to the fraught times in which we live. For others, Kanye West on Ye perhaps (sorry not sorry), the lack of time belies a lack of ideas, skimming over complexity without delving deep. Like any new trend, it comes with new rules, and it appears some artists are better at working them out than others.
It’s fortunate then, that RAY BLK (Rita Ekwere) seems to know exactly what’s she doing with her major-label debut: Empress, released through Island Records. Winner of the BBC Sound of 2017, Ekwere’s mini-album Durt turned heads with it’s vocal strength and a sharp sense of socio-political commentary, as she cast her gaze over issues like teenage pregnancy and gentrification. Coming in at only 30 minutes, Empress updates her sonic image with glossier production, 90s aesthetics and a sharper observational focus. The result is a condensed statement of intent, and a clear-sighted debut rich with all the vitality of a fresh, new voice.
Bubbling with joy and fire, it’s Ekwere’s personality that sits at the centre of this record. At once confidante and storyteller, you can’t help but be seduced by her warmth, by her insight, by her wit. On the track Empress, she walks us through the men she’s dated in the past, first scoping out their weaknesses before unleashing the verbal wrecking ball. Flitting smoothly between humour and wisdom, insights like-
‘He couldn’t let me in / Said he got burnt and now he doesn’t trust women / I can’t pay for somebody else’s sins’
-effortlessly crack open masculine clichés of emotionless virtue. Ekwere is a master storyteller. Weaving micro-detail and macro-landscape from bar to bar, she invites the listener into highly specific worlds which, in her voice, acquire an epic scale. Capable of reverberating depths and upwards-spiralling scales, Ekwere’s voice shifts easily from delicate fragility to dense, empowered strength. This is the voice of a popstar with power, a musician at the start of something massive, demanding that we listen as she preaches from her pulpit of vocal vivacity and strength.
And if there was a sermon binding the tracks together on this record, it would be a bursting call for women’s self-reliance, for female empowerment within patriarchy. Whether she’s antagonising the masculine urge to buy female subservience on Got My Own, or celebrating the power of her mum – single during Ekwere’s childhood – on Mama, the conceptual thread running through these tracks is an optimism rooted in feminine strength. These moments of specificity open up wider cracks in patriarchal norms, but always from the other side, from the side of survival, of celebration, of resilience in the face of oppression.
And for the most part, all of this is carried by a track production crafted to celebrate the scope of Ekwere’s vision. On Run Run, Fred Gibson utilises restrained drum programming under taut, pacey synth stabs, transcribing the momentum of the lyrics into a cinematic plane, expanding the horizon. The power of the production here is the coherence with Ekwere, coalescing with her timbre to widen the scope of her words. Mama is a funky, joyful R&B jam crafted around Ekwere’s natural warmth, drawing out the soul of her voice and granting the hyper-specific details of her life epic stature. The production style is immediately recognisable, utilising received musical tropes to render RAY BLK’s message universal.
There are points, though, when this clarity of production, this universalisation of form, runs the risk of dampening the blade. Don’t Beg is an impassioned cry for self-recognition, as Ekwere strikes at those who put her down and celebrates her own self-worth. The lyrics, taken on their own, are heart-breaking. But Jordan Riley’s production feels lightweight by comparison. From the glossy piano keys to the gospel-esque vocal doubling at the chorus, it feels like colour-by-number instrumentation, as if ripped from a how-to on 90s R&B ballads. It diminishes the effect of Ekwere’s words, like biscuits held too long in milky tea. The sharp-shooting social commentary demands a coherent, idiosyncratic production style – look at Solange’s Seat at the Table or IDLES’ Joy as an Act of Resistance – to retain it’s specificity, and ultimately that’s something RAY BLK doesn’t quite find in Empress, despite seeming to tiptoe around the edges.
It’s part of a bigger conversation about pop music and politics. The threat, I suppose, is that the use of musical production techniques homogenous with consumer-pop mires the content in a nest of banality, of surface level attraction. That’s often what motivates the anger when pop icons adopt political slogans: it neuters their effectiveness by re-transcribing them into the codex of consumerism. But if that’s the threat hanging over Empress, then for the most part, the record comes out kicking. Though the production of some tracks may slide into the unimaginative, Ekwere herself is irrepressible. Her idiosyncrasies and insight soar out of individual tracks, and bind the record as a whole into a concise and punchy statement of arrival. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Released 2018 on Island Records
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