Kelis kaleidoscope 4shared8/16/2023 We put this record that we were playing around with, making a silly video in the afternoon in Virginia Beach while we were cracking jokes and pulling pranks and being kids. But I was by myself, almost any of the team that I recorded the record with. I had no idea that these things were going to mean something to me, they were going to mean something to everyone else.Īnd it's not like I was fighting to be on these stages: Someone booked me there, and I was like, Okay. I was too young to even understand that this was a different era, a different time. I understand a lot more now than I did at the time. Hopefully the full-scale disco makeover won't scare off the future-funk fans who've sustained her career thus far.I don't think that I understood the gravitas of the situation. Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope. Or maybe Americans still want pop-dance that's more pop than dance. pop charts, which bodes ill for Flesh Tone. Whereas once her voice got lost between the Neptunes massive beats, on Flesh Tone Kelis blends with the rhythm for the first time.Īnd yet, despite Britney revitalizing her career with an even more robotic sound, despite the fact that you can turn on the TV and see the (even more) affectless La Roux strutting her chilly stuff, "Acapella" bounced right off the U.S. But here she's clearly working in the tradition of the archly mechanical disco diva, where little eruptions of passion color a delivery as metronomic as the beats. But there's also something oddly mannered and/or affectless about many of her performances, which you can easily see alienating fans of a genre built on emoting. Sure, she lacks the show-stopping pipes of a Beyoncé. Now you can't entirely chalk up Kelis' career foibles to a mercurial marketplace, or an unadventurous public, or label mismanagement. It's also frequently great, at least if you're already enamored with big, bright, synthetic dance music. All of this subgenre synthesizing is a bit shameless. And "Scream" shifts from beachside house piano to Kelis imitating a haughty electroclash ingenue. The electro riff on "Acapella" lurks in the background, under Kelis' low-key ecstasy and Guetta's melodic bells-and-whistles. Naturally everything gets sweetened a bit, given that Kelis is still working with the radio (rather than the dancefloor) in mind. (Naysayers might call them clichés, with the obligatory upturned nose.) Kelis' producers, including such hipster-unfriendly names as David Guetta and Benny Benasi, have fashioned a catalog of super-club staple sounds. It's structured to flow as smoothly as a pop DJ mix, complete with shape-shifting instrumental segues between tunes. Fans of Kelis-as-leftfield-R&B-singer should consider themselves warned.įlesh Tone can be as harsh as anything the more brutalist French producers turned out last decade and as melodic as last season's Ibiza smashes. No, this is unadulterated house music, of the sort that's gripped continental European hedonists for almost 20 years. Nor is it one of the over-sugared confections Benny Blanco has spun for Britney or Ke$ha (where sugary becomes barf-worthy). This isn't one of will.i.am's stadium-storming pop-dance hybrids, despite the fact that the BEP scourge is now one of Kelis' benefactors. Now, it sounds so of-the-moment, a full-length exploration of the house music influence that's been all over the radio over the last few years, that it's easy to hear it as a pre-planned attempt at nine hits in a row. A decade ago, this album would have been career suicide.
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