Kelela's Raven Brings Light Into Darkness

A review of Kelela's stunning sophomore record and her first in six years

Kelela for Dazed Magazine. Picture by Justin French

There is, perhaps, not a single bird species to which humans have ascribed more meaning and myth onto than the raven. An entire Wikipedia page is dedicated to the cultural significance of the bird, among which rank: a harbinger of death in Celtic cultures, the messenger of regent god Odin in Scandinavian cultures, the first bird to be released from Noah's Ark, and both trickster and creator of the world for the Haida people settled in the Northwest coast of North America. As one of the myths of the Haida people goes, Raven steals the light of all the world that was contained in a box within a box within a box and brings light into the world. In the process of escaping, drops some of it that later turn to the moon and the stars.

In a conversation with Billboard regarding her much-anticipated sophomore album Raven, her sophomore album following a seven-year gap since her ground-breaking debut Take Me Apart, Kelela also reads from Wikipedia. The image of the raven acting a psychopomp mediating between two worlds - balancing them, if you will - speaks to her own music, she tells journalist Heran Mamo. To understand why she thinks of her music as a balancing act when her music seems content to exist outside of any conversations - trap and streaming wars in 2017, and Tiktok-accelarated, pitch-modified music mainstream of 2023 - one must turn back time to 2020. Amidist the protest wave of the murder of George Floyd, the Washington-born Kelela Mizanekristos sent her label and her previous collaborators a document. In it, she made her needs clear - and if they were not met, she would not work with them. The responses - and the lack thereof, as well - is what led her to cut ties with Sony Music Publishing. Then there was the fact that she suffered from writer's block, feeling rusty in the booth - ultimately coming to the conclusion that the pursuit of perfection is a capitalist psy-op. The unhurried feeling is heard in Raven, as is the fact that there's less cooks in the kitchen: Asmara, LSDXOXO, and Bambii pop up most often in the credits. A frequent worry that Kelela had was that her unique blend of R&B, pop, and house created a divide between her fanbase: the Black listeners were drawn in because of her R&B vocals, and her white listeners were drawn in because of her electronic trappings. On Raven, Kelela intended to service her own community first and foremost: the Black LGBTQ community and the dance music that she's enjoyed herself over the years. She's not the first one to honor them lately - Beyoncé's RENAISSANCE also comes to mind - but Raven sounds more lived-in, less interested in big, glossy pop moments that Beyoncé has made her career of time and time again. And unlike recent revivals of 2step - PinkPantheress comes to mind - Kelela's decidedly more chilled out on Raven.

The balancing act, on an auditory scale, is the push of Kelela's voice (unshowy, but full of longing and icy cool whenever the situation requires it - not unlike the late Aaliyah) and the pull of the beats, symbolized directly by the wash of water that opens and closes the album, like a baptism or a cleanse. They clash together on the opener Washed Away, where Kelela's voice floats over the cascading synths. But besides the point of exit, closer Far Away, the rest of the album is decidedly quieter. Sometimes, the melody will swell and urge on, only to immediately pull back to calmer waters for stretches at a time. The drums feel underwater or pulsating beneath a thick layer of skin, like on Happy Ending, and even Kaytranada's usually strong drums feel dimmed on sensual highlight On the Run. The little details in the album are both hidden under the hypnotic lull of each track and audible in plain sight, whether it is there is the distant ring of a phone swimming in the mix of the breakbeat tango of Missed Call, the sonar radar at the end of Divorce, or the tingling synths on Bruises. But far from the listener having to strain themselves to pick up on all these strains - what devotees usually try to allay as "rewarding multiple listens" - Raven will often pit the differing moods and genres together back to back: an offering to ambient music on Closure segueing to 2step garage on Contact, segueing to the ambient offerings Fooley and Holier, eventually leading to Raven, which starts off equally spaced out and syrupy only to kick into house midway through all the way until the end of the next track Bruises. And on highlight Sorbet, everything seems suspended as Kelela sings over the foggy ambience. Kelela always remains master of the situation, though, no matter the beat and the mood. The track list and the ingenuous transitions track to track makes the balancing act sound effortless here.

On a lyrical level, though, the balancing act becomes a more complicated matter. Unlike the sound, there isn't a clear entry point here, thanks to the elliptical beginning and ending of Washed Away and Far Away. Nevertheless, the story follows Kelela wanting to be with her lover, but something - maybe the lover - still being uncertain. Or is it Kelela being uncertain? In this sense, the pulsating Happy Ending paints the situation the clearest: a stalemate is suggested here that could be resolved if one of them makes a move. At the beginning, the blame is on the other person - if you don't run away, could be a happy ending after all - but Kelela makes no attempt of chasing after her - it's not over, she simply asserts, and: I'm reading all the writings on the wall. The writings on the wall, we find out, is the lover's trepidation - perhaps they feel guilt for being who they are, or for the intensity true love can bring; in any case this gap between Kelela and her lover and her fills the album with a dramatic question where Kelela and her lover have two different answers to it. For Kelela, the answer seems simple, the gap shaped in the physicality of the body. But through all the pleading in the second half, she steels herself, and here is where the title track's switch-up is crucial, a second submerge into the water: the hype will waver, she intones, I'm not nobody's pawn, and with her, the synths twinkle as if signalling a transformation. When she's done - when the club beats fill her - her soul returns to her body, free from the worries that she has mirrored of her lover's, with what is a direct over the line, goin' in tonight. With her check-in, with the explicit just right that segues into Bruises, Kelela can close the distance (Sorbet) and, fully healed, reconcile with her lover in Enough For Love. No longer are signs read here. Instead, a timid Tell me what's going on with you, baby? makes way for genuine communication. Though often in the album, Kelela will say how she can make do on her own as well, solitude is more poisonous than helpful, and love a force as strong as the water and storm motifs that appear throughout the album. The act of reaching out at the end and to be washed away with the bookend Far Away suggests that one can only be stronger in a company - that true love doesn't fill a hole, but multiplies what already exists. It's easy to see the late writer bell hooks's influence here, her book The Will to Change having appeared in Kelela's own Black reading primer in 2019. As much as Kelela intends Raven to be an introduction point to instrumental club music - and, as such, for the story to play out in real life by the listener themselves - the lyrics seem too intentional, too consistent to be seen as simply throwaway words that match the beat.

I've come across this tweet while trying to look for screencaps on Twitter that said "headphones simply not enough, i need to feel kelela's music coursing through my veins," with a screencap of the anime Serial Experiments Lain in which the titular main character is hooked up on cables and looks completely dazed. It stuck with me on two levels. One, the sentiment is right: Raven feels like the album where sound therapy makes total sense for me, where ears just feel too poor to truly experience the record. Two, that the picture is from Serial Experiments Lain, an anime with a strong cybernetic aesthetic and glitched-out visuals in its opening. Raven's music videos, too, oscillate between crystal-clear, high-definition images and low-quality, grainy images that shows fragments of bodies up close: a butt, a smile, bodies in ecstasy. Again, there is a balance at play: of the distance that the high-definition cameras provide, and the sudden immediacy of videos recorded by the phone. Somewhere in between, the voyage to true love seems takes shape that is just within arm's reach at the end of the visual.

There is a nocturnal quality to Raven. The songs practically come alive past sunset; their spellbinding production, Kelela's stunning vocals, and the overall finish glow at every turn. Though it may seem like other artists breaking the mainstream have begun to catch up onto Kelela's sound, Raven proves that everyone is still ages away from matching Kelela's vision. We'll be hearing the ripple effects of this record for years to come. But for now, this love letter to the Black queer community shines like a beacon, enough to whisk you someplace far away.