From the largesse of its Coltrane-referencing title to its intro/outro framing, R&B singer Bilal’s latest album, A Love Surreal, is a work that demands attention. His previous album, Airtights Revenge, was a distinct piece of experimental neo-soul music. It took the conventions of its genre and warped them into something alarming and even dangerous, but it never made the sort of claims to importance and greatness that this latest outing so clearly does.
The claustrophobically dark, electronic hip-hop-based production on his previous album served as an intriguing backdrop for his enrapturing falsetto, but it required that the listener have a patience for repeated listening and perhaps an experienced palate for contemporary musical forms.
A Love Surreal does away with this exclusionary sonic exploration and instead, through an impressively sincere vocal performance bolstered by astounding organic musicianship, makes a claim for Bilal’s potential mass popularity and perhaps even his rightful place in the canon of legendary male R&B vocalists.
When a critic makes this sort of claim in the year 2013, it seems negligent to not include some topical comparison to the past year’s R&B savior and superstar, Frank Ocean. Although Ocean has done incredible things for the genre, it is largely through his rejection of the limits imposed by the label of R&B artist that he has achieved artistic merit and cultural prominence.
Bilal, on the other hand, leaves you with no doubt of his R&B credentials. Ocean’s statement is one of unbridled musical modernization; Bilal’s is one of respectful restraint, and on this album, he proves that R&B can be a permissive and relevant 21st-century form while still remaining solidly within the genre’s aesthetic bounds.
The Soulquarians, of which Bilal is a member, was a hugely influential collective of artists (including Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, J Dilla, and Questlove) that worked to create a new sound in the ’90s and ’00s that owed just as much to hip-hop’s charisma as it did to rock & roll’s musicality, soul music’s sensuality, and the harmonic complexity of jazz.
On A Love Surreal, Bilal reminds us of this part of his musical background. The first true song on the album, “West Side Girl,” begins with the classic neo-soul mixture of a homegrown-sounding staccato bass line moving in the midst of a sixteenth-note drum pocket, accentuated by stuttering analog synths and subdued electric guitar. When the vocals arrive, we are comfortably in Bilal’s world. When he sings, “I’ve got one question / could you roll with a cat like me?” we know that he knows the answer is, quite obviously, “Yes.”
The next track, “Back to Love,” finds the singer occupying the role of a questioning lover whose relationship seems to have lost its spark. And though the song’s laid-back jazzy feel is immediately recognizable as a John Legend trademark, Bilal comes across as sharper, more exciting, and ultimately more remarkable than his smooth-crooning peer. This similarity also rears its head again later in the album on “Never Be the Same,” but hints of glimmering, mysterious synthesizers in both songs put the listener in an Eros-fueled fantasyland that is certainly unknown territory for such strictly traditional soulmen.
Instrumentally, this album leaves very little to be desired. The electric guitar parts are prominent throughout but delicately delivered, and they never outshine the songs themselves. Indeed, the intensity of the six-string creations seems to rise to meet the challenge of their context. On “Slipping Away,” a darkly cinematic piece of minor-key blues in a three-four time signature, the incredible anger and pain emanating from Bilal’s post-love wailing is somehow matched by a staggeringly powerful display of pure rock & roll guitar shredding. When the solo suddenly comes to an end and we are left only with the final thoughts of an immensely sad piano coda, the visceral power of Bilal’s creative vision becomes obvious.
This penchant for such a brooding cinematic mode continues on “Butterfly,” a piano-vocal duet with modern jazz’s biggest-name celebrity, Robert Glasper. The sounds of rain and rumbling car engines fill the space behind Glasper’s emotive, almost melodramatic playing, creating an urban physical locale for the main act’s sober contemplations of gloom, regret, and lost beauty.
The sadness of love’s absence is perfectly encapsulated by a hypnotic acoustic guitar loop on “Longing and Waiting,” a track that speaks to how the excitement and passion of lust give way to bleak emptiness after the deed has been done. For fans of Outkast’s “The Love Below,” this song’s bedroom dialogue will trigger familiar emotions of voyeuristic intimacy. But when layered atop a creepy, potentially Tyler-esque synthesizer lead, this intimacy does not invite the listener to come closer, but forcefully locks you in the lovers’ chamber.
It seems to me that very few fans of popular music will be able to get through this album without encountering at least a couple songs that tickle their fancy. Working with a truly talented cast of musicians, Bilal has managed to bring the neo-soul sound into a new decade, and he has done it without betraying the things that have brought so many listeners to R&B in the first place.
His subject matter, the many manifestations of love and lust, is standard fodder for soul music, but it’s in his incredibly unique vocal delivery, masterful production ethos, and performative flair that we begin to see the beginnings of a new legacy in R&B music.
At the end of one of the album’s acoustic tracks, “Lost for Now,” Bilal sings, “Take all the pain away / make this heart brand new.” In a way, renewal is precisely what he has achieved on this release. His brand of music is unfamiliar to us; it pulls so many creative strings while never letting us forget that it is indeed nothing more than beautifully executed R&B, and that it really doesn’t need to be anything more.