Skip to main content

Christion Gray VibeZ

Thirty tracks from a singer whose records are too honest for gospel radio and too devout for R&B radio — which is exactly what makes them interesting.

Christon Gray Releases New Single 'Closer (Restore My Sight)' | CCM Magazine

Christon Gray

Christon Gray came out of the Christian hip-hop and R&B world — he is a member of the collective W.L.A.K. alongside Alex Faith, Swoope and Dre Murray, and he appears on records by Tedashii and Da' T.R.U.T.H. — and he has spent his career testing how far that world will let an artist go.

The answer, on the evidence of this playlist, is fairly far. His records deal with marriage, infidelity, doubt, money and reputation in explicit terms, set to production that owes far more to D'Angelo and Maxwell than to contemporary worship music. The result sits in a genuine no-man's-land, and it is considerably better than most of the music on either side of it.

His voice is the other reason to pay attention: a light, flexible instrument with real gospel training behind it, used with unusual restraint.

What to listen for

"Afraid With You" is the best introduction and the most emotionally direct thing here — a song about fear addressed to a person rather than to God, which is the whole tension of his catalogue in one track.

"Seekrets" and the "May 22, 2015" interlude are part of a sequence about a marriage, and they are startlingly unguarded for an artist from this world.

"Moving On" and "Leave on Read" are the most contemporary-sounding, and "Ride the Wave" is the smoothest.

"You & I (Samson's Lament)" is the most ambitious arrangement and the clearest statement of the record's theology — a biblical story used to talk about a very present failure.

"Take Me To the Water" is the gospel moment, and "Black Male (Blackmail) Interlude" is the political one.

"Grow Up", "KingPen" and "50 Shades" are the deep cuts, and the family features — Art Gray, Taelor Gray, Aubrey Gray, Mya Gray — are worth noting as a thread running through the whole set.

Go deeper

The Physical Bible (2016) is the album that best represents him, and School of Roses (2013) is where the sound was established.

W.L.A.K. as a collective is the immediate context. For the wider field of artists working the same edge between sacred and secular, follow Swoope, Jonathan McReynolds and, from the other direction, Kirk Franklin's collaborations.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more