Skip to main content

Shae Universe VibeZ

Shae Universe writes about love with the emotional literacy of someone who has thought hard about it. Sixteen tracks that reward slow listening.

Love's Letter: a British R&B album with something to say

Shae Universe is a London singer-songwriter of Nigerian heritage who has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in the current wave of British R&B — a scene that has quietly become one of the strongest anywhere, running through artists like Cleo Sol, Jorja Smith and Olivia Dean.

What sets her apart is the framing. Love's Letter is structured as exactly what the title suggests: a sustained address on the subject of love in its various registers — romantic, self-directed, disappointed, restored. It opens with "Love Self" and closes, in this deluxe sequence, on "Ebbs & Flows." That is not accidental.

What to listen for

"More Than Enough" featuring Lalah Hathaway is the centrepiece and a genuine event — Hathaway, daughter of Donny and one of the most harmonically sophisticated singers alive, does not appear on records casually. Her presence is both a co-sign and a masterclass.

"LOML" and "Passenger Princess" are the singles, and both appear again in alternate versions on the deluxe — "LOML Acoustic" with Joseph Solomon and Jace strips it to voice and guitar, and "Passenger Princess" with Aqyila adds a second perspective.

"Oh, Wait..." is the sharpest turn on the record, and the Nao feature on the deluxe version deepens it considerably. "What's Luv?" and "No Capacity" carry the album's most direct writing — the latter title being a small masterpiece of contemporary phrasing.

"Warzone (Interlude)" does what a good interlude should: changes the temperature without breaking the thread. "Summertime" appears twice, including an ESTA. remix that pushes it somewhere warmer and more elastic.

Sixteen tracks including the deluxe additions. An album to play in order.

Go deeper

The Lalah Hathaway feature is an invitation to go further. Her Lalah Hathaway Live is one of the most technically astonishing vocal records ever released — she sings chords, audibly, which should not be physically possible.

For the British R&B scene Shae Universe belongs to: Cleo Sol, Nao (who features here), Bellah, Tiana Major9 and Sault are the essential names. It is arguably the strongest concentration of soul songwriting anywhere right now, and it operates almost entirely outside American attention.

For the Nigerian-British thread specifically, Obongjayar and Little Simz are working related territory from very different angles.

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