Review Summary: Sugary, futuristic R&B stuck in the purgatory between promising and unfulfilling.
Honestly, sometimes music criticism seems a little unfair. Considering how hard an industry it is to make some form of income, it’s a blessing we have new music constantly available to us in the first place. Having been writing my own music for the best part of the last decade, I struggle with being too critical of artists considering how difficult records are to make. The industry is in a weird place, particularly with the ubiquity of streaming and the deluge of artists squabbling to grab 2 seconds of your attention. Teeing off on a local band who have invested a stupid amount of time into a small collection of songs just seems to be poor form, regardless of the quality of music.
The stakes get a bit different, however, when I start listening to major label artists. These are no longer strangers investing their savings into their passion for music; these are artists with big teams behind them, an actual budget, and consistent access to quality studio time. These records should, for all intents and purposes,
be better than what small indie labels or self-produced artists are putting out.
This is what makes records like
Ry Ry World so fundamentally disappointing.
Ry Ry World clocks in at a meek 28 minutes; the cynic in me suggests that this record was a little rushed from the start. Mariah the Scientist is still a relatively new artist, and curating a portfolio and presence for Mariah Buckles is probably top priority for the execs at RCA. We’ve seen artist like Post Malone brag "30 for a walkthrough, we had that bitch lit", highlighting the lucrative business of just being a celebrity. The album is not the product anymore. The artist is.
Mariah the Scientist projects as the Jhene Aiko/Kiana Lede type - a fantastic voice with a great potential for marketability. 2019′s
Master served a great introduction to Mariah the Scientist, the beats laced with futuristic 80s and cheeky fictional accounts of playing a villain. Buckles’ range and ability were impressive, backed by the production values only a big label could afford. The garden-variety pop/R&B of
Master really threatened to be something if she could just lean in a little more to the creativity and artistry of the artists that inspire her.
A dominant follow up would have served this purpose, but instead we get a limp collection of tracks that have all of the bite of a flat soda. ‘Walked In’ barely departs its type beat origins, a symptom of a derivative endemic that is plaguing R&B at large, while songs like ‘Aura’ want to get by on a beat that has all the punch of a paper bag while Buckles’ stumbles through themes of infidelity. The two features on the record are hard not cringe at, both lyrically and sonically - I can only hope someone at RCA might start to see how played out autotune on rapping is starting to sound. The record even clips in places which makes me wonder if they even bothered with mastering the thing.
For all of its faults,
Ry Ry World still finds a diamond in the rough, the stunningly sweet ‘2 You’, the chorus of which happily colouring in with the same melancholy brushstrokes of its lyrics. Buckles’ enunciates certain words here with a level of sincerity that is hard not to be moved by. The song, along with a number of tracks from Master, serves as a reminder of the potential Buckles undoubtedly has. Her sound is not quite there yet, and perhaps it might be wise to take a little more time to flesh out her songs, but no doubt I’ll be just as excited to hear her next offering whenever it happens to roll out.
