Solange: When I Get Home
An Album Review
Solange released her fourth album this month, “When I get home”, and, much like the rest of the critical world, I am filled with mixed emotions about this piece. It is a slow release project, unhurried and hazy and imbued with the ability to transport us to her hometown Houston, with it’s long summer days and nights that move at a crawl. But how long do we really want to stay there?
From the get-go we can tell that this is no easy money, quick fix album. “When I get Home” has clearly not been produced with the goal of generating sales, but to be an impressionist piece of art that is listened to in it’s entirety and transports us to her Texas childhood. The electric piano churns out jazzy chords like a mourning cry, constant and ever in the background, never too loud to distract you from Solange’s crisp, clear voice, that often cuts in unexpectedly and repeats the title a million times, or bursts into soulful, church choir uproar, like in Sound of Rain.
The album is tangible, and as you go from top to bottom you feel yourself get heavier and heavier in the wicker chair on the porch in Houston, with the honey like summer sun weighing on you. The album is almost psychedelic in the way that it mixes different instruments, that often seem to pop up out of nowhere and merge into the melody regardless of its spontaneity. I’m listening to the album as I type this out, and I can feel the light-hearted laziness that comes with the atmosphere Solange has emulated so perfectly. As far as melodies go, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Solange was responsible for not only all the melodies, but all the lyrics. “When I get Home”, at it’s core, feels like a piece of art sitting up in a museum (I will say the Louvre for… no specific reason), in that one can enjoy it when we sit and look at it as it is, on the whole. As one piece.
The way the album is put together is genius, to the specificity of the placing of the various interludes to the way the ending of one song, is often the beginning of the next song (Almeda’s ending fades right into Time is). However, do I think that you would enjoy any song on the album if it played while you were on shuffle? Absolutely not. “When I go Home” is a moody playlist, and while some songs may be plucked out and can be enjoyed on their own, you can’t really enjoy the other songs on the album with surrounding yourself in the album as a whole again. Does Solange really care about how ‘playable’ her songs are? I highly doubt it. While Cardi B is almost always on the radio no matter how hard you try to avoid her, artists like Solange and Lana Del Rey, aren’t really concerned with a pioneer song on their album, that can be played until our heads explode. That doesn’t make them any better than Cardi B, that’s just who they are as artists. “When I get Home”, like a painting at the Louvre, can only be enjoyed as a whole. You can’t enjoy art if it’s torn to pieces.
Life is rarely kind to the siblings of super stars, and Solange has managed to step out of her sisters shadow and establish herself as an artsier, almost weirder version of the Queen B. That being said, the album is now giving me a headache. Why? The repetition.
I cannot stand the droning repetition in this album. This wouldn’t be a problem if it stuck to the interludes, but the recurrence of the same phrases over and over again grates on my mind and gives the impression that Solange ran out of ideas and tried to fill in the space. The album is hovering on greatness, but misses the mark because that’s exactly where it is going. Hovering. It’s like the album has no end, like you’re trapped in essentially the same four songs playing on repeat, with the same premise. The album plays like the unraveling of a single idea, spun out a few times and played on repeat.
The chanting is cute on a few songs, my acceptable pass is My skin My Logo, but other than that it’s migraine inducing and flat. While I applaud the creativity and vision that’s been put into the album, it feels like a project with huge ambitions that fell flat on the smallest of hurdles. The album hovers on pretentious, and while there is real artistry in what she has done, the lack of more than three lyrics per song kill every chance I have to enjoy it. I have a few tolerable songs, including the one song that I feel can be played on it’s own (Stay Flo). Definitely not an album I’ll be adding to my collection.
Tolerable Songs on the Album:
