Review Summary: 150
Faithful to her audience’s intelligence as well as her own, the Philadelphia neo-soul/alt-rock shapeshifter Res’ 2001 debut LP
How I Do is a thrilling act of generic recombination and an image of the soul both. Res AKA Shareese Ballard, producer Martin AKA Doc McKinney later of The Weeknd’s
Trilogy, and young and assertive lyricist Santigold FKA Santogold FKA Santi White throw away the rulebook from the album’s raucous start and seem unconcerned with any losses incurred: the joy of willful abandon resonates throughout every convention-flipping guitar strum and twinkling piano arpeggio over which Res thinks, always with humility and humor, about the world.
Opener “Golden Boys,” purportedly written by Santi as a secret dig at the rapper Mos Def, immediately signals Res’ intentions as a musician, incorporating crusty digital strings and trip-hop percussion and Res’ commanding, delightfully drawling voice in a manner that renders the song awe-inspiring, first for its innovations in the synthesis of contemporary musical traditions and second as a condemnation of a man, rendered with the kind of specificity Res and Santi seem to consider prerequisite to speaking out as artists and people.
Beautiful and bountiful and disarmingly warm as a communication of internal strength,
How I Do holds strong to the bona fides established by “Golden Boys”; from the following track, Orwellian radio rock sugar-rush “They-Say Vision,” to the damn hidden track, a power-chord chugger shoehorned into the end of “Tsunami,” but also ultimately including detours into reggae and trip-hop and hip-hop and rock and soul,
How I Do is out for blood in establishing a piece of autonomous music-historical legacy, a little utopian timeline or family tree branch of its own. I’m not sure how Res’ lyrical presentation of vulnerability as power is modified or commented upon by her gleeful genre play, except insofar as the latter serves to open us up more fully to the former, which remains just about the most elegant an arrangement between the senses and the intellect to which we’ve ever had recourse.
