Kingdom - Tears in the Club
Pitchfork 67
Ezra Rubin (aka Kingdom) is an architect of the post-club sound—a new profile cleaved from caustic synthesizers, herky jerk percussion, and crying on the dancefloor. The melting pot of sounds he and his collaborators in Fade to Mind (Nguzunguzu, Total Freedom) and Night Slugs (Bok Bok, L-Vis 1990) offered pulled from UK garage, dancehall, and diva-driven house that still seems prescient. Rubin, in particular, helped shaped a postmodern vision of R&B alongside Kelela and Dawn Richard that’s influenced everyone from FKA twigs to Justin Bieber. Rubin was staged to make a pop crossover. His debut LP, the delightfully titled Tears in the Club, is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his panoply of sounds agreeable to a general audience.
This is immediately clear from the album’s opening moment, “What Is Love,” a collaboration with SZA. Rubin is no stranger to producing for powerhouse vocalists, but with Tears in the Club he dips his toe into the world of major label team-ups, and the result has neutered the outré aspects of his sound. On “What Is Love,” certain trademarks still pop up—vaporous synth pulses and staccato percussion—but he’s slowed down the normally breakneck pace of his music to somewhere sleepier and almost lackadaisical. In the past, Rubin’s slow jams (Dawn Richards “Paint It Blue” for example) had a seething atmosphere just bubbling beneath the surface. With SZA, that feel is gone. This is also true of some of his solo tracks. “Nurtureworld” is a confusingly out-of-focus dance track that spends most of its three minutes finding its proper footing, and the album’s title track is a defanged version of the controlled chaos he once offered.
Yet, Kingdom recovers from these missteps. “Each & Every Day,” his collaboration with Vine star Najee Daniels, adds a shot of bubblegum into his otherwise ominous productions. It resembles what Charli XCX would sound like singing over a DJ Rashad beat. His second song with SZA, “Down 4 Whatever,” benefits from the more vigorous, energetic beat Rubin provides. A solo track called “Into the Fold,” offers a picture of what pop-ified post-club music could sound like—bright whacks of drums and smokey looped vocals mingle well with more experimental elements like a dissonant hiss in the background. But his thesis statement for this album comes on a song with the Internet’s Syd, who might be the perfect vocalist for Kingdom’s attempt at a crossover style. Her slinky voice follows Kingdom’s syncopations beat for beat, and the protean, mercurial change in pace befits Syd’s ability to pitch shift on the fly. It’s a promising peek into what Kingdom could do for a radio-ready artist.
On a recent release, Vertical XL EP, Rubin filled inhuman sounds with soul, and Tears in the Club attempts to take that idea to a mass audience. One wonders if he is unintentionally softening his music for the sake of a breezier product. It’s less a statement of purpose and more of an experiment with an inconclusive hypothesis. Instead of heightening, or focusing the pandemonium he could unleash on the dancefloor, his work is denatured by a fairweather disposition. Even if he never means to, Tears in the Club is a disappointingly genteel work, from an artist known for anything but.
Tiny Mix Tapes 60
Kingdom
Tears in the Club
[Fade To Mind; 2017]
Rating: 3/5
The mere title Tears in the Club is a neat inversion of a lyrical theme that runs through quite a lot of hip-hop and electronic music, though it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Think about what it means for us to be confirmed as subjects by being decentred by — and then internalizing the gaze of — the Other, a phenomenon encapsulated in the lyrics of will.i.am and Britney Spears’s 2012 hit “Scream & Shout”: “When we up in the club/ All eyes on us.” The gaze here seems to come from everywhere (all eyes on us), but it’s ambiguous because it is at the same time envious (as if there’s something about us that makes us the deserving targets) and hostile (which makes living up to these expectations impossible). Inside all of this is the horrifying idea that we should always be watching ourselves (all eyes on us includes our eyes on us), ensuring our bodies are toned, our strut confident, our moves hot, to get a verdict of approval that will always be cruelly denied us.
Tears in the Club works through what it feels like when all the confidence that the “club gaze” demands of us collapses because of an unforeseen catastrophe — when, to quote Kingdom collaborator Kelela, we give someone eyes, but they misread the signs; or seeing your ex kissing someone else; or when you know you’re going to regret going out tonight, because you don’t feel like it, and that fact is going to take its revenge on you in the wee small hours, staring at you like the grim visage of moral failure. Tears is yet another complement to a prevailing cultural mood of sadness. Dancing the night away simply won’t cut it when the outside world seems poorer, nastier, more solitary, and more brutish than ever before.
The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler. It might sound good on a tear-drenched dancefloor, but it comes across as static in other settings: the played-straight vocals on “What is Love?” and “Breathless” are intended to be club-kid collages, but they’re neither soulful nor sleazy enough to be interesting, and the pitched-up vocal loop on “Each and Every Day” is simply infuriating.
However, “Nothin,” “Down 4 Whatever,” and “Nutureworld” are rewarding listens in a way that the rest of the record simply isn’t. “Nothin’” sums up the mood: the synth pad sighs softly against Rhodes keys, while guest vocalist Syd sets out the basic conflict right from the start: “All these insecurities a woman can’t fix/ But I know that liquor and depression don’t mix.” “Down 4 Whatever” does basically the same thing (“I be missin’ you even when you be around,” sings SZA), but the chorus is catchier and the beat is chunkier — all bass drum bounce and twittering hi-hats — with the pitched-up vocals playing a role typically reserved for cooing backing vocalists.
The desperately short instrumental “Nurtureworld” is probably the standout. The fragmentary vocal loop is impossible to make out, but it fits in perfectly with the various synth sounds. Everything is submerged in a thick fog of filters, smudged make-up, ruined outfits, and the fact that it’s just too damn loud in here to hear the apology you’re so clearly owed.