Raheem DeVaughn - "Try Again" (mp3)
After Raheem DeVaughn's debut album, The Love Experience, was released by Jive in 2005 following years of delays, and its singles barely charted, his popularity in his Washington, D.C. area seemed to multiply every year, but it was hard to say whether that would translate a national audience. But in the last few weeks, that question's been decisively answered as his new album, Love Behind The Melody made a top 5 debut on Billboard, and its lead single "Woman" got a Grammy nomination before the album even hit stores. That's not a shock; slowly building grassroots sleeper success, and getting Grammy love regardless of radio airplay, are pretty much the only kinds of success that neo-soul singers of his ilk ever achieve. But it's still nice to see him doing well, and he's definitely more than a cookie-cutter retro R&B guy. He works in the same vein of R&B heavily influenced by '60s and '70s singer-songwriters and psychedelic rock as the most recent albums by John Legend and Alicia Keys (who, unsurprisingly, is DeVaughn's most famous fan), and his longtime self-applied nickname of "The R&B Hippie Neo-Soul Rock Star" might have found its moment when that's actually a cool thing to call yourself.
I didn't like DeVaughn's voice much at first; he has this whispery, restrained singing style similiar to D'Angelo (an overused point of comparison in neo-soul, but apt here), and the way it gets all whistly and airy in upper registers used to really get on my nerves. But as I said, he's hugely popular in the D.C./Maryland area, and hearing him all the time I've grown to really like his voice, especially the midrange stuff that often reminds me of Marvin Gaye. Some mainstream R&B singers have taken to making hip hop-style mixtapes where they sing original lyrics over backing tracks from other people's hit songs, but I can't think of anyone who's done it quite as much as DeVaughn, who's made 5 volumes of his Street Experience mixtape series so far, and some of those cuts are among my favorite stuff he's done. DeVaughn is from Maryland and, despite being generally acknowledged as a Washington, D.C. artist, has worked with a ton of Baltimore rappers (Labtekwon, Bossman, Hots, D.O.G.) as well as working with Baltimore's DJ Lil Mic on his mixtapes. Even my homeboys One Up Entertainment produced a track on the new album, "She's Not You."
Love Behind The Melody is not a great album, nor is it as bold or creative as it's perhaps being touted as, but I'm really enjoying it, considering that I'm not always the best audience for this kind of R&B. There are some smoldering, immaculately produced ballads, and the Kwame-produced "Friday (Shut The Club Down)" is pretty brilliant as far as blatant grabs for radio play go, using a Temptations sample that's as brash and obvious as, say, the sample on Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls," and references a bunch of recent hits, but is still utterly unique and catchy as hell. There are also some bad ideas (like letting Floetry of all people make sex noises on "Marathon," or Malik Yusef's cloying spoken word on "Woman I Desire"), and the bland metaphors of songs like "Love Drug" and "Customer" are reminders that there are worse ways to liken everything to love or sex than the broad, ridiculous but sometimes inspired way R. Kelly approaches that formula. "Energy" is, seriously, practically a note-for-note rewrite of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" (although the Dungeon Fam collaborator on it is Big Boi instead of Cee-Lo), and I really didn't need to hear that.
"Try Again" is far and away my favorite track, one that popped up very late in the album, and very slowly grabbed me. The piano playing, which constantly drags behind the beat so much that it feels almost drunk, at first irritated me, but the way it loosely dances around the steady breakbeat eventually became part of its charm, especially once the song builds to the big gorgeous harmonies and horn stabs. By the time it gets around to that bridge, I was completely hooked, and as the song slowly fades out with just DeVaughn's voice and that drunken piano, I just want to put the thing on loop for an hour.
After Raheem DeVaughn's debut album, The Love Experience, was released by Jive in 2005 following years of delays, and its singles barely charted, his popularity in his Washington, D.C. area seemed to multiply every year, but it was hard to say whether that would translate a national audience. But in the last few weeks, that question's been decisively answered as his new album, Love Behind The Melody made a top 5 debut on Billboard, and its lead single "Woman" got a Grammy nomination before the album even hit stores. That's not a shock; slowly building grassroots sleeper success, and getting Grammy love regardless of radio airplay, are pretty much the only kinds of success that neo-soul singers of his ilk ever achieve. But it's still nice to see him doing well, and he's definitely more than a cookie-cutter retro R&B guy. He works in the same vein of R&B heavily influenced by '60s and '70s singer-songwriters and psychedelic rock as the most recent albums by John Legend and Alicia Keys (who, unsurprisingly, is DeVaughn's most famous fan), and his longtime self-applied nickname of "The R&B Hippie Neo-Soul Rock Star" might have found its moment when that's actually a cool thing to call yourself.
I didn't like DeVaughn's voice much at first; he has this whispery, restrained singing style similiar to D'Angelo (an overused point of comparison in neo-soul, but apt here), and the way it gets all whistly and airy in upper registers used to really get on my nerves. But as I said, he's hugely popular in the D.C./Maryland area, and hearing him all the time I've grown to really like his voice, especially the midrange stuff that often reminds me of Marvin Gaye. Some mainstream R&B singers have taken to making hip hop-style mixtapes where they sing original lyrics over backing tracks from other people's hit songs, but I can't think of anyone who's done it quite as much as DeVaughn, who's made 5 volumes of his Street Experience mixtape series so far, and some of those cuts are among my favorite stuff he's done. DeVaughn is from Maryland and, despite being generally acknowledged as a Washington, D.C. artist, has worked with a ton of Baltimore rappers (Labtekwon, Bossman, Hots, D.O.G.) as well as working with Baltimore's DJ Lil Mic on his mixtapes. Even my homeboys One Up Entertainment produced a track on the new album, "She's Not You."
Love Behind The Melody is not a great album, nor is it as bold or creative as it's perhaps being touted as, but I'm really enjoying it, considering that I'm not always the best audience for this kind of R&B. There are some smoldering, immaculately produced ballads, and the Kwame-produced "Friday (Shut The Club Down)" is pretty brilliant as far as blatant grabs for radio play go, using a Temptations sample that's as brash and obvious as, say, the sample on Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls," and references a bunch of recent hits, but is still utterly unique and catchy as hell. There are also some bad ideas (like letting Floetry of all people make sex noises on "Marathon," or Malik Yusef's cloying spoken word on "Woman I Desire"), and the bland metaphors of songs like "Love Drug" and "Customer" are reminders that there are worse ways to liken everything to love or sex than the broad, ridiculous but sometimes inspired way R. Kelly approaches that formula. "Energy" is, seriously, practically a note-for-note rewrite of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" (although the Dungeon Fam collaborator on it is Big Boi instead of Cee-Lo), and I really didn't need to hear that.
"Try Again" is far and away my favorite track, one that popped up very late in the album, and very slowly grabbed me. The piano playing, which constantly drags behind the beat so much that it feels almost drunk, at first irritated me, but the way it loosely dances around the steady breakbeat eventually became part of its charm, especially once the song builds to the big gorgeous harmonies and horn stabs. By the time it gets around to that bridge, I was completely hooked, and as the song slowly fades out with just DeVaughn's voice and that drunken piano, I just want to put the thing on loop for an hour.
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