Heavn - Jamila Woods

Provenance: My partner went to a Jamila Woods show and bought a copy of Heavn. They said that "I might like it", and it's ended up in our shared, monolithic CD collection (only Blue Oyster Cult and Michael Jackson are kept reverentially separate), so here goes.

Review: I'm really not qualified to talk about Heavn at all.

Now, regular readers of this benighted blog will no doubt be wondering why I've only awoken to my almost crippling limitations this far down the line. And it's fair, I don't consider myself a Robert Christgau (nice website mate) or anything of that calibre. I poke and pry, and sometimes alight on the odd insight or two; I tend to be more at home with metal than other genres; heaven forfend that I try and step up to the plate with a jazz review. I would suggest, humbly, that one of my strengths is that I know what I know, and correspondingly I have a fair idea of what I don't know.

So, I know that I don't know enough to appraise Jamila Woods' full-length solo debut Heavn in anything other than the most superficial aesthetic terms. Why? Because unlike the person I am sharing a life with, I have no idea what it's like to be raised as a black woman in America, and this notion of the beating heart of the song cycle. Okay, you might counter, what could I possibly share with the guys in Motley Crue or ZZ Top, or with Tom Waits? My answer - lots of cultural touchstones, a collective musical inheritance (which ironically appropriates tons from black-origin forms) and a society that is happy to propagate the notion that the least amongst us white folk is still better than someone else. And in the USA, that's black people, Latinx, indigenous peoples, queer folk - and good fucking luck if you intersect across any of these designations.

Here goes, then - this is pretty damn great. The production is whipsmart, all wobbly electro-dreamscapes and snappy beats. Woods is a rather lovely singer - sweet and mellifluous, which honeys some incredibly stark messages. Eric Garner's choking at the hands of the police is referenced in 'Vry Blck', a track that sounds like a playground chant, and I'm sure that the dazzling, swirling 'Heavn' slips in a reference to the slave trade with the same sly, allusory quality employed by Randy Newman on 'Sail Away'.

I like the way that Heavn swings between moods; at times it exhibits a playful, wilful strain of juvenilia that's also present on cuts by Tank and the Bangas; at others, there's a dense, layered jazz-tinged soul-pop sound that resembles KING's first album, which I properly loved. Collaborations are judicious, which makes a change; Chance the Rapper, to take one instance, shifts the pace nicely in 'LSD' with a dense, push-pull verse that abuts Woods' sleeker versifying very effectively.

Perhaps even more than the black female experience, however, is how strikingly personal Heavn is. Little nuggets of a life zoomed in at microscopic level shine through every now and again, to the extent that a line like "I be in my nightgown, chicken wings ready" feels both utterly humdrum and utterly voyeuristic. This intimacy is heightened by the spoken-word interludes studded throughout Heavn, which are made to sound as if Woods is talking down a phone line. It genuinely feels like engaging in a conversation, listening to Woods' joy at unexpectedly being able to bond with other black women through shared schoolyard games, or sharing the story of how she got her name, or musing about living a life true to oneself. It's all apiece conceptually with everything else on Heavn, and it's wonderful.

I'm very sorry if I've blundered through the album, missing any number of references that Woods has painstakingly woven into the tapestry of Heavn. For what it's worth, I'm smitten with this cerebral, passionate, reflective, sumptuously crafted offering. It feels apt that Heavn finishes up on a reprise of the most affirming track, 'Holy' - "woke up this morning with my mind set on loving me / I'm not lonely, I'm alone / And I'm holy by my own" - a message of self-love that everybody could do with, from time to time.

Stronger WithEach Tear - Mary J Blige

Provenance: My wonderful partner, the poet Sea Sharp (and here I'm sounding like Vincent Price, who always referred to his wife as "the actress Coral Browne" (I sincerely hope your inner voice read that out in his voice)) was given this as a graduation present.

I want to preface this by saying that tonight will be the first time I'll have ever listened to this album, and indeed, any Mary J Blige album. To my discredit, my knowledge of Blige and her output could easily be written on a postage stamp, leaving enough room for me to list my favourite Steely Dan songs, which happens to be all of them.

Review: First off, without even hearing a note, what is this horseshit cover art? A nice big picture of the artist, her name's nice and clear, and the album is called Stronger, fine. But what's this? On closer inspection there's a kind of subscript under the word 'stronger' seemingly designed solely for the benefit of amoebas or protozoic lifeforms, and it reads thusly - 'withEach Tear'. Thanks Blige - Stronger withEach Tear looks absolutely stupid and you've given me eye strain.

However - there's a sizeable portion of my album collection that features terrible cover art (mostly in the heavy metal genre) and I still dig the sounds, so let's judge this on the music. 'Tonight' starts off promisingly enough, with a grainy, pulsing Wu-Tang bassline overlain with a shimmering synthesizer borrowed from Fat Larry Band's 'Zoom'. I certainly like Blige's voice, and on this and subsequent track 'The One' it's manipulated with clever production to produce a range of interesting effects. Both are in a minor key and ride atop edgy, tricky beats, generating a skin-tightening tension that I really enjoyed.

It dips a bit on 'Said and Done', as a lubricious synth riff gives way to a fairly bland-sounding chorus; even so, the rather neat darkwave influences make it worthwhile. The next track is where everything turns to moose manure; 'Good Love' is an uptempo frothing fountain of piss, anchored by Club Tropicana brass and a guest verse from T.I. that did negative things to my I.Q. 'I Feel Good' can't be any worse, but it sounds like the Des'Ree / China Black collaboration that nobody asked for.

It becomes uncomfortably clear that on SwET, Blige is far more accomplished with the gritty, sultry or aggressive material than she is with the brighter, shinier gubbins. It's fair to say that the rest of the album plays out this way. Blige's voice is a thing of beauty, possessing clarity in full voice and a hint of bite when in declamatory mode. Her producers (and they are legion) have also used phasing and filtering effects intelligently; on 'I Luv U' for example, the combination is quite subtle, the mixture of natural and robotic voices turning the track into a tour-de-force of wind-tunnel techno-eroticism. It's the last truly great track on the album, but it's a cracker. Closing track 'I Can See In Color' comes close to greatness. Blige puts her full dynamic range on display out in front of the kind of downbeat heavy-lidded soul track that used to cook behind one of those characteristically gargantuan Isaac Hayes slow jams.

I can't say that I've become a fan of Mary J Blige since listening to SwET but I have become an admirer, albeit with qualifications. Blige is certainly a masterful singer, and with sympathetic material is absolutely capable of bashing out a masterpiece. The thing is, I don't know quite which direction would best serve Blige best. On the one hand, I'd love to hear a full album of her duking it out with Daft Punk in futuristic heaven; on the other hand, 'I Can See In Color' hints at the possibilities of Blige looking backwards and recording steamy, funky soul with the Swampers (or whatever their latter-day equivalent is) down at Muscle Shoals. With this much talent, it's perhaps hard to know which way to turn - which is also a reasonable summation of Stronger WithEach Tear (seriously, fuck this album title).

Chaleur Humaine - Christine and the Queens

Provenance: I got this from my partner, Sea, for Christmas 2016. Today is an apt time to revisit this album for the blog as this weekend, five years ago, we married on a cold day in Kansas. Same as this weekend; married on Saturday 4 February, Superbowl on the Sunday.

For people who have shared a life together for over half a decade, we actually have little common ground when it comes to music. Our biggest overlap is Tom Waits, and I dig most of Michael Jackson's catalogue. I've been pleasantly surprised by Feist, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Wood Brothers, all of which have come to my by way of Sea, but aside from that my only other real concession has been that Tupac is "not shit" (I believe those were my actual words).

I can't think of much from my CD collection that Sea proactively listens to. My partner's (rather good) impersonations of Neil Young and AC/DC lead me to believe that both have been listened to, if not enjoyed, on more than once occasion. It's as if we both have a vague understanding of each other's musical preferences without being completely fluent. I had no idea who Christine and the Queens were - or, as it turns out, is (Christine and the Queens is the stage name of Heloise Letissier) - so this was quite a gamble on Sea's behalf. How did it turn out?

Review: How boring - it seems that five years of matrimony has actually bred a degree of familiarity between us. I wish I could tell you that my partner had me figured all wrong, because that's more interesting, isn't it? How two people can spend so long in each other's company but not really know each other. On the one hand, Chaleur Humaine is not an album I would've purchased if left to my own devices, but lo and behold, it pushes all the right buttons because I'm a sucker for this kind of ear candy.

There's bits of trip-hop, borrowings from glitch-pop, a slightly dubstep feel to a couple of tracks ('No Harm Is Done' being the most obvious example) and even echoes of early electronica like Space (the French band) and Yellow Magic Orchestra. What really makes me give a shit is that the songwriting is so, so strong. Christine and the Queens always does something interesting with the melody. That said, one of the vocal melodies in 'Saint Claude' drove me nuts for about two weeks until I realised it was the same as 'I Saw Red' by Warrant, and 'Jonathan' sounds like a stately, slow-mo version of The Stranglers' 'Always The Sun', but I like both songs so no complaints here.

Great care is also paid to the acoustic quality of the singing; and so often French is sung instead of English, where the French is more playful, or alienating, or beautiful. Letissier's voice swoops, climbs, croons and declaims, sometimes in the span of one song. As far as I can make out (I'm one of the few British kids who didn't study French in school) the subject matter of each song is more interesting than your average pop fluff. For example - "It" name-checks Emily Dickinson and appears to be about the kind of gender performativity Judith Butler and (especially) Jack Halberstam wrote about. This ain't yer dad's high-concept Anglo-Franco art pop.

(As a student I read Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place (listed in most places under the name Judith Halberstam - I believe they use both masculine and feminine pronouns, so apologies if I've fucked this up) and felt compelled to email the author - his address was in the back of the book, I believe - with a few thoughts and questions. To my surprise, not only was Halberstam gracious enough to reply to my sophomore witterings, he also expressed a desire to discuss my notes in person next time he came to the UK. I panicked and never replied - sorry! Can I also recommend In a Queer Time and Place as an excellent work about queer subcultures? One of the few books at the more theoretical end of the scale to make me laugh, too.)

Given the somewhat esoteric themes explored on Chaleur Humaine one could be forgiven for thinking that the album lacks soul. The absence of analogue instrumentation means the music certainly possesses a mechanical iciness, and this is matched by an elegance that borders on archness. There is certainly little of the whispered confessional here; however, Chaleur Humaine is the product of such singular vision and execution that it is inescapably personal. I'd love to see this all performed live.

One criticism - rhythmically speaking, Chaleur Humaine is rather one note. Aside from variances in tempo, you get pretty much the same beat pulsing through each song. Listened to in one sitting, the effect can be a little wearying. A minor complaint, but one that merits a mention only because everything else is so well crafted. I look forward to seeing what Christine and the Queens comes up with next.