Raye’s ‘jack of all trades’ sound is something I’ve been held up on for a while. Her list of songwriting credits is incredibly impressive given the range of artists she has adapted her work to, but it also reveals the lack of an identifiable, trademark sound in her solo work.
Raye’s often seen doing this classy British R&B thing embodied by the likes of Amy Winehouse, Sade, Adele, and Olivia Dean. You could say Raye sometimes sounds a little like each of them, but coming out with the corollary statement that ‘Amy Winehouse is like Raye’ sounds completely absurd. There is a very tangible sentiment and lore around these artists that shapes how we consume their music, but this feels completely absent when it comes to Raye.
To carry out a simple experiment to understand how others view Raye, I went onto her Apple Music page, where it bafflingly lists Dua Lipa, Anne Marie, and Tate McRae as similar artists. Perhaps years of adapting her pen to suit other pop stars have only reinforced her tendency to leave any personal narrative at the studio door.
Raye throws absolutely everything at this project: jazz and soul flourishes, orchestral arrangements, spoken-word interludes, elongated song structures, the drama of the tortured artist, and the general atmosphere of someone who has recently discovered theatre and reverb.
There is passion in this project. The amount of energy, genuine emotion and care that went into this record is inextricably evident. However, all the ambition, talent, and budget in the world cannot guarantee the forging of any emotional resonance. Amplifying the scale of your work will make the artistic depth grow proportionally.
Lyrically, she circles pain, darkness, failed relationships, healing, family, self-worth, trauma, but never with enough specificity to let you form an image of what is going on. It’s cinema without any actual scenes. There are songs like ‘I Know You’re Hurting,’ which are well written and feel very meaningful, although most are weighed down by this tongue-in-cheek, British millennial sort of humour that I find deeply aggravating. By the second song, ‘I Will Overcome,’ she’s already made a disingenuous comparison between her vague, nondescript malaise and Amy Winehouse’s suffering that feels deeply offensive.
It feels so generalised in the pursuit of relatability that it strips out any trace of personality. Nothing is ugly, contradictory, or conflicting enough to feel real. It’s all been polished into nothingness.
Thematically, the album is officially structured into four seasonal acts. Autumn and Winter: suffering. Men are bed, London is wet, she is walking alone at night in a fabulous coat, having a beautifully lit breakdown. Spring: relationships. Summer: family, healing, transcendence, enlightenment, whatever.
There’s no interrogation, no complication of the narrative, no interest in uncovering anything. She just performs the illusion of feeling at you until she expects you to confuse intensity with insight. In concept, the album is a much shallower retread of the ideas explored on Lizzy McAlpine’s last album. In execution, it emerges with a similar level of depth to The Life of a Showgirl. Overall, it amounts to a step down from her previous work, My 21st Century Blues.
For how technically immaculate the production sounds, it only further exposes the conceptual fault in the writing. While the lyrics are about as introspective as post-breakup Instagram stories, the instrumentals sound like they are soundtracking the fall of Rome. The extremity of the mismatch frequently tips the album over into self-parody.
The Hans Zimmer collaboration is the clearest example of the album’s terminal lack of proportion. ‘Click Clack Symphony’ arrives with the sonic self-importance of a state funeral for a song about how going out with your girls is fun. Hans Zimmer, possessing the emotional range of a teaspoon, fails to grasp that scoring everything as though it were the climax of human civilisation does not make the music any better. The frequent disconnect between the scale of the production and the banality of the writing makes my eyes roll into my skull. The album ends with yet another spoken word moment about how the darkness will be overcome and a four-minute recitation of the album’s production credits, because no cliché is too stale to be revived if accompanied by enough strings. Ultimately, Raye sings incredibly and performs the idea of significance with astonishing commitment. However, there’s a gross confusion on this album between maximalism and depth. The project’s most enjoyable moments arrive in its latter half, when the apocalyptic orchestral dramatics are finally stripped back in favour of a more grounded soul sound. Tracks like the Al Green-featuring ‘Goodbye Henry’ and the funk-driven ‘Skin & Bones’ prove that there is great music on this record, if only she were to let go of the urge to stuff an infinite amount of ingredients into the pot. In this sense, the album’s inconsistency is both a gift and a curse. This Music May Contain Hope is a fascinating misstep, but there are a couple of great songs here worth seeking out.
“Raye, Pryzm, Kingston” by Drew de F Fawkes is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
