Take Me Apart – Kelela (2017)

When listening to Take Me Apart, the now-celebrated 2017 debut album from Kelela, you have to accept that “Frontline” is the relatively unimpressive opening act to the anticipated spectacle to come. It goes through its motions, with its scoffing remarks mostly sung without being palpably felt.

But after five minutes, the intro to “Waitin” creeps up. The space occupied by the music gets wider, the clubby bass and synths pantomiming lights on the club’s stage, everything halts at Kelela’s command, and when the music starts again, you are moving forward with it. You can hear her voice gently dissemble into pieces in the chorus of the title track, with frenetic drums and swirling synths tracing the speed of her free-fall.

The next thing you know resonating pads and lopsided rhythms wash over you like waves. Kelela sings like a mythological siren, beckoning you to come closer and offer a caring ear to these songs, spectral signifiers of a heartbreak replaying on loop in her mind’s eye. You hear her reflect on how things are now for the best on “Better,” and you can tell that she has just arrived at this revelation, because that is the only time it feels as gut-wrenching and unsympathetic as that song sounds. You hear how she ended up here in the first place on “Blue Light,” giving into her urges and abandoning her inhibitions far before it was too safe to do so over the sound of a bass synth that somehow sounds non-Newtonian. You hear the more familiar sound of elegiac cellos on “Turn to Dust,” and she does exactly that, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, unable to contain the weight of the feeling in her stomach when she locks eyes with that person, the one responsible for all of this.

And somehow, all of these moments are contained in the expanse of “Enough.” She pleads for the listener – referred to as “love” – to look at her “standing by myself.” She wants you to turn to dust with her, to go where she has gone. The sonic waves swell up like sea foam, and you can see her not just standing but also floating, like Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell, and the only thing that can contain her soul is the ocean of noise undulating around her, molding itself to the immensity of her desire as it bursts out from the temporary fantasies that barely accommodated it before now.

★★★★