3 hours ago
5
Last autumn, Raye was the subject of a lengthy profile in a major fashion magazine. In it, the singer told an anecdote that placed her in precisely the position you would expect following her successful debut album: ensconced in the studio with a very big name producer, the better to capitalise on its success. But the recording session was, she suggested, “fuckshit”: the producer simply turned up with a beat and expected her to sing over it. Raye declined to, as she put it, “do that dance … I was just thinking: ‘Get me out of here.’”
This story seems telling in light of This Music May Contain Hope, an album that very much suggests an artist determined to go her own way. It’s about an emotional breakdown occasioned by romantic woe, online criticism, a troubling call from her grandmother and, she notes, “seven negronis”. And, like Lily Allen’s West End Girl, it flies in the face of perceived wisdom about how people consume music in the streaming age, being a 17-track, 73-minute concept album divided into four sections and evidently intended to be listened to from start to finish.
It is filled with lengthy, episodic songs that unexpectedly leap from Raye’s trademark retro soul into the realm of swing-era jazz – the ghosts of Ella Fitzgerald’s early singles with Chick Webb’s band hover around I Hate the Way I Look Today – as well as house music, showtunes and 50s easy-listening schmaltz. Her soprano is occasionally deployed in distinctly operatic style; elsewhere her vocals take on the careful enunciation of the musical theatre star. There is a lot of very rococo orchestration, much of it in the style of a soundtrack from Hollywood’s golden era, and the guest stars are heavyweight. Soul legend Al Green appears on Goodbye Henry, a sweet homage to the southern soul sound of his classic 70s hits, and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer arranges Click Clack Symphony. There are fourth wall-breaking lyrics (“I told you this was a sad song – I did try and warn you”) and there is a great deal of spoken-word exposition.
It is, by any metric, A Lot. Indeed it occasionally feels A Bit Much, as it wobbles unsteadily along the line that separates unbridled self-expression from self-indulgence. The world could probably have lived without Life Boat, a deep house track topped with a plethora of differently accented voices all saying “Never give up”. Or Fields, a dialogue between the singer and her grandad, personal and heartfelt though it obviously is. Some of the spoken-word stuff seems distinctly surplus to requirements: it isn’t really necessary to explain to the listener that they are about to hear a song about heartbreak if the opening line of said song includes the phrase “my first love kissed me goodbye”. And album closer Fin lasts six minutes, four of which consist of Raye reading out the production credits.
So there are flaws, but in fairness it pays off more often than it fails. As evidenced by current single Nightingale Lane, its highlights are pretty skyscraping. Beware … the South London Loverboy sets a snappy lyric – “he’ll grab your arse and squeeze it before he leans in for a kiss” – to hugely exciting music that splits the difference between the Andrews Sisters and a finger-snapping mid-60s soul revue. The WhatsApp Shakespeare makes thrillingly John Barry-esque use of the orchestra, transforming bumping mid-tempo R&B into the stuff of high drama with its sudden diversions into swing and, ultimately, eerie Twilight Zone atmospherics. Skin & Bones and I Know You’re Hurting are more straightforward but no less exhilarating, dealing respectively in tough funk strutting and a ballad that builds and builds from a gloomy piano figure into all-guns blazing stadium rock replete with faintly metal-ish guitar solo. Raye sounds incredible throughout – she sings the hell out of these songs, and there’s nothing ersatz about her approach to the jazz tracks, which is not always a given when a pop vocalist shifts in that direction.
And despite the moments that feel de trop, it’s hard not to like This Music May Contain Hope. It is wildly ambitious, in a pop era in which a lot of artists’ ambitions extend no further than maintaining their career. But the end result feels less like a showstopping grand artistic statement than a wild, fascinating, occasionally messy miscellany of ideas. If you were desperate for a classic rock analogy, you could say it’s more Tusk than Rumours, or more Sandinista! than London Calling. Which makes it something of a rare event: you simply don’t get many albums like this in the 21st century, because the climate of the 21st century has led artists to be risk-averse. That’s not a label you could pin on Raye.
