Kelela grounds her debut album in the earthly business of sex, romantic intimacy, power, and how these intertwine in intricate but always human configurations.
By J. Ery Díaz
In early releases, Kelela Mizanekristos painted an over-saturated backdrop of acid to better highlight her vocals. Her voice, sweet and precise, always contoured the harsh spikes of her tracks’ production, a sudden flash of light in grimy basements. This led producers like Bok Bok and Kingdom to remove and sharpen as shorthand, and even if a single like Bank Head might hollow out into sparseness to better accommodate her airy maneuvering, most of her output sounded abrasive at the expense of her proclivity towards R&B. Take Me Apart, however, places Kelela in complete command of a chilly soundscape to best mold to her vision and will: it’s her honey-dipped range that makes synths contract, expand, and warp rather than the other way around.
The ‘alien-ness’ in its songs is immediately apparent: a friend described ‘Waiting’ as what a Janet Jackson single would sound like in the Blade Runner universe. In the Arca-produced ‘Enough’, the instrumentation does recall cacophonous gusts of wind in an alien cavern, all powerful whooshing and lit-up quartz stalagmites. A hum of machinery and whirring clicks adorn cuts like a dispatch from the generator room in a space patrol ship, the percussion bounding the pulsating matter in the warp drive. Yet Kelela is an incredibly emotive vocalist, and every track is firmly grounded in the earthly business of sex, romantic intimacy, power, and how these intertwine in intricate but always human configurations.
The most recognizable rushes of feeling draw potency from her gifts in augmenting fizzy intoxication: the emotional predecessor of this release is the 2015 lead single ‘Rewind’, which transposed the exact pleasurable jolt of returning someone’s gaze at the club. In Take Me Apart, unbridled possibility and the thrill that it carries mutate into a collection of moments where a word, or none, could expand or collapse connection entirely. In the instants narrated in ‘Enough’ and ‘Onanon’, to return another’s touch might wreck things irreparably. The lyrics, however, embrace this discomfort and shoot past superficial ruminations, laying bare the gamble in opening up to lovers. Every deliberate move to reveal herself establishes Kelela as someone who prefers not to shy away from emotional honesty, and this charges songs with urgency.
Sometimes this open-hearted quality is best served by conventional R&B song structures, again indebted to Jackson’s sleek legacy. The Ariel Pink-assisted ‘Waiting’, possibly the purest earworm in Kelela’s entire discography, would fit right in with 1986’s Control if not for its spaciousness and occasional trap-influenced dynamics. Pulsating, infectious, and quietly sweet, it hums in the register of overthinking, smartly repurposing one of the hooks from 2013’s ‘Bank Head’ to accentuate the electric charge of bumping into your ex — “It’s all I dreamed of (as before) / It can’t get started”, she laments. In ‘LMK’, mid-tempo beats and twinkly synths chart the path of a night out where one might hook up or go home alone. And the title track roils before climaxing with bright, multilayered harmonies somewhere between Destiny’s Child and Disney’s Hercules (“Don’t say you’re in love / until you learn to take me apart”). It’s all just the correct level of eager and hopeful, and one marvels in how her delivery drips with controlled sweetness without any trace of naivete.
This mastery comes, of course, from harnessing sexual energy. In the media lead-up to the album’s release, Kelela championed the liberatory potential of ‘topping from the bottom’. “The irony of how you’re actually the top when you’re demanding someone take you apart — it’s about the permission, that blurry line in sex that’s not so literal in real life”, she mused in an interview with The Quietus. Through consent and communication and the appropriate dance in revealing oneself, she explained, one can unlock the mutable, fluid torrent of desire. The last stretch of the album is all blue-tinged embers and calculated invitations for the possibilities of touch. “It’s getting dark / Stay or leave”, she orders in “Truth or Dare”. With its squealing synth-guitars, “Blue Light” showcases anticipation’s electric frisson before arriving at an apartment at 3 A.M. In ‘S.O.S.’, she admits that “I could touch myself, babe / But it’s not the same”, craving the intense satisfaction in reciprocal release. The power dynamics in this album make portrayals of BDSM like Madonna’s Dita look hilariously outmoded because, beyond the aesthetic of whips, chains or leather, the core of any BDSM relationship lies in mutual, clear-eyed vulnerability. “You’re in the position I put you”, Kelela teases.
But like all BDSM, no encounter is ethical without aftercare. The quiet, bare-bones ‘Better’ is almost impossibly tender. “Didn’t it make us better? / Aren’t we better now? / I know it made me better”, she croons wistfully to an ex-partner after the mutual choice to part ways for a while. ‘Bluff’ steeps in a deep knowledge of what a partner needs despite superficial anger: piano chords sway while she assuages them that “You’ve already taken a beating / and all that you need is / Just a bit of this love”. And Altadena, with its MIDI gleecapella harmonies and spare, 80’s ambient riffs, ends the album with restorative healing (“In the middle of your week / When you get your head down / I hope you think of me / And how I moved it around”). Truly letting someone in, after all, comes with the possibility to steer ships back to land when things get bad, and wielding the power it brings with care can replenish our roots in the world. During an interview with Noisey, Tshepo Mokoena let Kelela know the effect the album had on her and Mizanekristos was so moved she started to cry: “It means so much… so much, that you would feel safer or protected or shielded”, she said. This deliberate tenderness, despite cutting at the heart, is Take Me Apart’s crown jewel. Sweetness, after all, can sometimes sound alien and feel like ice.
