Yes, “Raven” makes frequent and artful nods to house, techno and drum-and-bass, but more than anything, Kelela is making lights-off music — the kind you’d be happy to find whether dancing by yourself in the inkiest shadows of the nightlife or alone in your darkened bedroom during the tiny hours, hiding from sleep, trying to read the aura of your stereo’s glow.
To wit, at 9:30 Club in Washington on Thursday night, Kelela figured out how to deliver a nightclub show with a bedroom feel, clutching her microphone with fuchsia opera gloves that matched the color of her hair. And that was it. No band. No DJ. No backup singers. No props. No costume changes. No video screens. Just an auteur singing her songs, dancing like a sea anemone in the darkness of the ocean floor.
It all felt so deep, so intimate, so up-close-and-personal, which was funny, because “away” seemed to be Kelela’s favorite word. “You’re too far away,” she sang as the chattering breakbeat of “Happy Ending” reminded everyone in the room that they were supposed to be dancing. “Now I’m floating away, far and away,” she announced during the supremely propulsive “Contact,” elongating that second “away” while steering the melody toward the ceiling to better evoke the “floating.” Then, during “Missed Call,” air turned into liquid, and liquid turned into music: “Float away, float away on a river into the sound.”
Kelela clearly loves this word, not just for its implication of separation and isolation, but as a sound — one that suggests both a gap and its closure. Because, fundamentally, Kelela’s music is about loss, and longing, and imagining a profound togetherness in your abject aloneness, so whenever the word “away” comes rising out of her airways, the second syllable feels like it’s trying to cross some kind of metaphysical chasm, which is why she keeps casting that vowel sound out into the void, across space, across time, and ultimately getting there, making something incredibly distant feel spectacularly close, doing an essential thing that music and memories do, retrieving the irretrievable.
