In the throes of the pandemic,
what I most remember about this album
before putting it on again tonight, is that this
was my go-to take-it-easy and don’t-panic
album of 2020. Through my earliest
days of streaming, I listened to this
thing over and over; almost every night
I fell asleep to it, lullaby-like,
a soulful, quiet, soft pop rock binky
to soothe away all my COVID 19 fears.
I fell asleep to this album so many
times, it was rare that I ever made
it to the end of the album. But I
eventually bought the vinyl version,
maybe so that I could finally hear
the rest, or maybe just because it
was my practice early on (and still is)
to lay down the cash eventually
for an album I found myself streaming
on repeat.
The first time I heard this music,
given only the graphic art from the
cover on a tiny screen, a portrait of
a woman, ecstatic, wind whipping
through her hair, I would have sworn this
singer was a female, a kind of less
funky SADE, but in actual fact, the singer
songwriter who fronts the band
named RHYE is certifiably a dude, a man
who sings like a girl, pretty much
100% of the time. I’m not sure there’s
a single vocal on this album that is
not sung in the head voice. And a
beautiful head voice it is. Now that
I’ve got the LP, I could read the lyrics,
but I don’t. In my first dozen listens,
I didn’t care (and I still don’t care)
what he was singing about.
Whatever it was, it sounds forlorn
and love-lost and romantic and sad,
but soothing nevertheless, and groovy
in a mid-tempo way. The closest Rhye
gets to rocking is an uptempo disco
vibe, but even at higher BPMs, the
music of Rhye is music for chilling,
vibing, for close dancing (if that’s
a thing you do), and maybe, if you’re
feeling a bit world weary, or a
little run down by the news of the
day, for falling to sleep.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Home, Loma Vista Records, 2020, double black vinyl, audio on three sides.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
