Hoarse and husky with the weight of experience at times, at others playful and reminiscent of En Vogue on (almost) a capella overdubbed harmonies (will R’n’B ever get over En Vogue?), Kelis Rogers has more sections to her voice than a respectable girl band, and finds a place on this album for all of them. In the case of Kelis, whilst her vocal range is perfectly broad (and admirably strong across all of it), it is her register that impresses. Normally when critics speak of female vocalists (after they’ve gotten the T&A part of the package out of the way) the question of ‘range’ enters the discussion. That Food is a nod of the head to the last fifty years of soul and R’n’B is no act of arrogance on her part, not least because she has the voice to carry it. Poor hapless Duffy is the go-to example, whose jaunty efforts at chanelling a Berry Gordy vibe through her quite reasonable pipes were huffed away in a plume of withering text containing much barefaced use of the ‘paying her dues’ clause.Ī great deal earlier than Duffy was the cautionary tale of Terence Trent D’Arby’s Introducing the hardline…., which, a quarter-century on, sounds a lot more valuable to posterity than most of the words penned to condemn it.Īnd anyway, Kelis has paid her dues, at the edgier end of urban pop. Such reference/reverence has been attempted before, and usually met with derision. In music-land, there’s always a hip patriarch’s Motown vinyls to plunder). Sly Stone, Donna Summer, Gladys Knight – those sorts of roots (it is, after all, rare that a singer will admit to having the same Stock, Aitken and Waterman, NKOTB, 5Star, Grease-Soundtrack roots as the rest of us mortals. Instead, we have a suite of songs which, Kelis will likely claim somewhere in the promo cycle, takes her back to her roots. Hitting a stage of her career where diva antics would be excused, if not encouraged, Kelis neatly sidesteps the tendency to law-of-diminishing-returns Beyonce trashiness, and equally eschews the Des’ree grande doyenne approach (‘rather have a piece of toast’?!) to the role of journeywoman chanteuse. It’s certainly a record deserving of popular acclaim, despite not having a track on it which could be described as pop, exactly. Given that the last unbroken sequence of sunny weeks to hit the UK helped elevate Daft Punk’s warmed-over bilgecrust (surely the musical epitome of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ ethic) into the nation’s hearts, it seems only fair that Kelis should bring some of that summer love to the yard with Food. If the songs themselves were consistently of the same calibre it would be a great rather than a good album.With a dependable jetstream and a few good weeks of barbeque weather, Kelis may have landed herself the album of the summer. Sonically, then, Food more than holds its own.
#KELIS FOOD ALBUM MAC#
“Change” sonically reimagines The Mamas and the Papas in the age of Coldplay, “Floyd” is a spacey ballad, a meeting of Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp, “Bless the Telephone” is a nugget of Sixties West Coast strummery, and the closing “Dreamer” floats about like an offcut from Screamadlica fronted by the band’s backing singer Denise Johnson rather than frontman Bobby Gillespie.
#KELIS FOOD ALBUM UPDATE#
While the core sound may be an imaginative update of bluesy Memphis soul, redolent of the MGs, there are forays into other regions. Stylistically, Kelis is as untamed as ever. Gone is any shrill edge, replaced by a smoothness that recalls Smokey Robinson and classic male R&B. All the eating seems to have actually changed Kelis’s voice.
#KELIS FOOD ALBUM TV#
The best of it has the brassy psychedelic soul euphoria of the fantastic “Second Song” from TV on the Radio’s last album. This seems to have earthed her, moved her on from electro-pop plasticity towards southern soul.įood was created with David Sitek of TV on the Radio and was, apparently, made with casual contributions from his band, between endless tasty meals. Now, as a graduate of the Cordon Bleu Culinary School, with her own catering company and line of sauces, she’s revelling in food. The only time I interviewed her she spent much of the time talking about knitting. Even outside her music, there’s always some new enthusiasm. At her career’s start she explored the shouty borderland where R&B meets rock in “Milkshake” she created one of the sexiest, starkest, best R&B numbers of the century, yet her last album was produced with EDM-pop Satan, David Guetta.
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