It Made Me Better
Kelela’s debut LP Take Me Apart soars like an albatross on the merit of her writing. It’s a detailed, transformative record that romanticizes emotional destruction and rebirth — and it bumps, too.
I like to create an appropriate vibe before diving into a new album and letting the rhythms flow. For Kelela’s Take Me Apart, I entered an after-hours club where the beats pulse too slow to dance the night away and morning is just around the corner. When album opener “Frontline” creeps through the room with warbling synths and cascading chymes, the light begins to dawn on a finished relationship and a fresh perspective on what it really means to one woman to walk away knowing why. Imagery is difficult to achieve unless intimately observed and understood — eliciting a universal message using specific and personal moments is a covetable and carefully-honed skill. In the first two lines from her debut major label effort, Kelela transforms the quiet intimacy of her numbness following a break up into a roaring engine of sound and emotion. Throughout the album she uses these visualization strengths to bolster each track with feeling, power and intent.
Take Me Apart is an incredibly personal space to enter sonically that keys the listener in on a purposeful conversation with Kelela wherein she recounts her troubles in love and life. “Waitin” follows the opener’s confident swagger with the slightest falter; she addresses her ex-lover who she’s come face-to-face with once more. She reverses wintery imagery she created in “Frontline” — where once she burned inside against the cold from her willful want to leave, she now remembers the warmth she felt against the same chill when her lover was with her in the first place. The sensation created in “Frontline” with the sparking of a lighter, the touch of flame to greens and a deep inhale evokes an apathy with love itself, but in “Waitin” when she stops (audibly) to catch her breath when she sees her lover again, we hang on the edge of our seats with her to find out if he saw her, too (he hasn’t yet). Her voice leaps around the complicated production, gazelle-like, always gliding off the top just out of grasp and in the lead, and she creates deep harmonies that fill the space, bound around the depths and heights of her register and hasten the pace of the song.
The title track is the next and most passionate step in her narrative arc. Here, she’s left her lover and reconnected, and now she’s absolutely lost in the sauce. The production swirls in complex cool tones — every sound muffled, every beat lagging just behind, all the while spinning around and around as if cast together in a cauldron — and Kelela’s voice pierces through in beautiful falsetto notes that ignite like a white wine reduction, bringing together in mellow harmony all the charred bits from the bottom of the pan that taste the absolute sweetest. The sexuality is chewy saltwater taffy as she instructs her lover: “Don’t say you’re in love baby / Until you learn to take me apart.” She’ll wait as long as she damn well pleases for it to be good. We find out shortly, though, that she might’ve waited too long and is trapped once more.
When she coos on “Enough” that she will no longer tolerate her lover’s antics, the confident stare and head bob of “Frontline” are erased in a tonal shift. She is near tears, or possibly in the midst of them, as she drifts alone wondering if she’s doomed to solidarity after fucking up this love. She is so alone, in fact, that she finds herself deep in the galaxy orbiting “Jupiter” on the next track — her lover took her apart, left her out alone and now she must regain the strength to make a return journey. In an interview with iHeart Radio in October 2017, Kelela describes an adventure into a musical instrument-filled Vancouver hotel basement with Aaron David Ross, producer on “Jupiter”. Ross found a Roland Jupiter synthesizer and played what became the track’s haunting instrumental backing. In astrology, Jupiter is the thinker’s planet, conveying an intellectual yearning to grow in a positive way — it posits a quest for answers. Kelela pines for resolve in her incessant “in and out” of a tidal love.
“Better” moves to reconciliation and documents a back-and-forth between Kelela and her lover where she achieves striking clarity and maturity. She sings of specificity — a meeting on her birthday after the two haven’t seen each other for six months; a car ride through the Hills spent recounting past mistakes. “I know it made me better / Aren’t we better now?”, sings a matured lover with a dulled spark. In the quiet chorus Kelela plows down her listener with the awe-inspiring enlightenment of a woman at peace with her decisions and a strong optimism focused on how much better she has become. Self-reflection here allows the artist to divulge, more honestly, her deepest feelings. Kelela succeeds with flying colors at enveloping the listener in this sentiment of peaceful transition but it is by no means ebullient — the minor chords are melancholic, provoking tears when layered under her gorgeous harmonies in the second verse.
At this point, the album narrative transitions and “LMK” blares in with full TLC / Janet Jackson realness. Our protagonist has broken apart, grown up and moved on and now she knows she wants nothing short of up-front honesty and skin-deep intimacy. It’s rebound time and Kelela is adamant that she’s respected as an equal in this next relationship, though she’s not in it for the long haul. “It ain’t that deep, by the way / No one’s tryin’ to settle down / All you got to do is let me know.” When she hollers and runs through the end of the bridge over a handclap beat, you can feel the hunger expressed in her vibrato. “Truth Or Dare” is the other side of this coin: the confident excitement, the fire of a new fling when things begin to get hot. The beat rumbles around low bass notes that give this track a humid, hot-and-heavy texture. She’s not selling herself short: this one’s gonna be fun.
“S.O.S.” finds her falling under a spell that is the third side of this aforementioned coin. She wants transparency, honesty and no strings; she’s excited and ready to go but now, she’s getting lost in it. As the song fades with her wordless harmonizing, we wonder where she’s going to land with this fling, but as “Blue Light” fades in, we know she’s chasing this new fling head-on. Kelela stands atop her peer group of modern R&B leaders and influencers in her direct attitude conveying emotion, specifically in a sexual way. She enjoys giving her love and she yearns to receive in return, so she tells her lover to “keep the blue light on” as she abandons her impenetrable facade. “Gold in the offering / Darling, my guard is down.” Once she lets that guard down, we are hit with a familiar problem: this love, once again, is no match for her pace. She runs circles around her partners in “Onanon” where she identifies that “It’s not a breakup / It’s just a breakdown” — a communication breakdown. Against a beat that hustles along in quickstep, Kelela flows from her mind, taunting this lover’s inability to focus on her needs. She’s too astute to put up with anyone who doesn’t know why they do what they do.
The final trio of songs pack a wallop of a romantic awakening. “Turn To Dust”, against spinning strings and churning bass lines, evokes a more wizened, weary moving-on than even “Frontline” or “Enough;” instead of flirtatious confidence or weak, trembling solidarity, “Turn To Dust” feels more barren. It’s more bleak, and frankly, scarier than either of these two songs that share an emotional thread. Dust, and especially a person becoming it, has such a strong connotation of finality that this track solidifies in Kelela the confidence we thought she’d fully attained in earlier verses. “You got my mind and my body / Might get my soul … And I can’t take it / I’m walking out the door / I turn to dust.” The line reads like a godDAMN in the gut near the end of a record that consistently rides a rougher emotional roller coaster than many others. We get the sense that she really cannot take anymore and needs to truly escape this pattern, like a breaking point. As she sits broken, she reaches “Bluff” where she teases her lover to leave because she’s shifting into a state of serenity and isn’t troubling herself.
Altadena, CA, is an unincorporated city 14 miles north of Los Angeles just outside Pasadena. English producer Jam City was staying here when he collaborated with Kelela to produce the final track on Take Me Apart. “Altadena” soars on wings of encouragement; after subjecting her listener to a hurricane of numbness, heartbreak, romance, lust and hurt, storm clouds clear to allow sunny outlooks to push through. The album’s absolutely stellar production reaches conclusion here as all technical complexity drops away for the final minute to lay bare Kelela’s direct and delicate voice over a set of uplifting piano chords. “It’s not just me / It’s everyone,” seems a fitting way to end a record that establishes a universal connection with anyone who has loved hard and lost harder. Kelela is reminding us that she felt it, too, and felt it true and created this breathtaking album to give lovers and losers a rock to rejoice upon and relish in. It rests, rumbles and radiates — an astounding success of a debut from this futuristic prophetess of love, loss and evolution.
