If Seinabo Sey could present her debut full-length as a CV, a pair of bullet points would make her look bankable: one, she’s prodding the limits of popular R&B while many other artistes, from Janelle Monáe to Kendrick Lamar, are remapping the genre’s boundaries. Two, she’s Swedish.
Or half-Swedish, because her father is from the African nation of Gambia, where Sey has spent a substantial amount of her life; yet her main collaborator on Pretend is Magnus Lidehäll, who often works out of Stockholm and has co-written and co-produced songs for and with Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears.
Those aren’t interchangeable pop singers, and Sey’s singing is unlike any of theirs, so Lidehäll, exhibiting the willful sonic variety that can be heard in the back catalogs of ABBA and The Hives, helps her sew the epaulets of 21st-century R&B style onto the clean tailoring of classic soul.
Aptly, Sey’s potent lower register does merit comparisons to Mary J. Blige’s, and opens thoughtful depths that she explores confidently on piano-driven ballads like “Sorry” and “Poetic,” in which motes of earthly concerns float through dimming late-afternoon sunbeams of gospel.
Intimations of suddenly hushed chambers and candles protected by cupped, choral hands give “Burial” a more direct, more cloistered sense of taking the music to church. But on “Who,” Sey shimmies, under the darker and flashing lights of the discotheque, to beats and sentiments worthy of old-school Janet and Michael Jackson.
Although Lidehäll and Sey bring 2015 gloss to the most organic sound, such as the slide of fingers from one acoustic-guitar chord to another, the serious timbre of Sey’s voice goes back past Blige and Sharon Jones to the late Nina Simone and the ancient emotions of blues and jazz. That is why Pretend cannot be reduced to a pair of bullet points.
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