The colors of Solange’s new album

Listen this article

Last week Solange released her new album When I Get Home. These are our firsts impressions

When I Get Home… that sounds tired after a day of work and also sounds like a relief for lying on a couch. This is the title of the new album by the Texan singer Solange. What evokes this title reminds A Seat At The Table , which also gives a sense of hospitality. This album, of 2016, received outstanding critics because of the necessary thing it was and because of the urgency that was felt in it. This new album feels more restful. Like A Seat At The Table, the front cover of When I Get Home shows Solange's face looking directly at the camera, so we know, from the beginning, that it will be again a very personal album. Solange likes intimacy.

Leer en español: Los colores del nuevo disco de Solange

The album was released in accompaniment to a short film starring, directed and edited by Solange. In it, we see typical Texan elements such as rodeo scenes, hats, cowboy boots, and horses. All these images resignified in a kind of minimalist futurism that is combined with pictures of the buildings of Houston, her hometown. Thus, When I Get Home is an exploration of the origin and a return.

An imagined past

The album begins with "Things I Imagined." The past that Solange returns to is an imagined past, which is how memory works: like an invented look of something that we already live. Thus, the images exchanged for the short take on meaning in the sense in which the buildings of Houston are interspersed with the images of an imagined city of cowboys in frosty boots. When I Get Home sounds soft and feminine at first. The interludes between the songs work as threads between the references that the artist makes in her hometown. It is colorful as the paintings of the cars of Houston, the "candy car paint jobs" referred to in "Way to the Show."

After the second interlude, the disc becomes a pastel color. In "Dreams" she says "I grew up a little girl with dreams": she gives an image of herself in the past imagining what it would be like now. In this slow and slow song, she sings about the patience with which we must wait for dreams to come true. If I have to describe this disc through colors, I would say that after the disc turns black, it braids the hair and raises its fist. In "Nothing Without Intention", the third interlude, you can hear a sample of Omi Lola, a spiritualist who recommends "Florida water" to cleanse the energies and advises "do not do anything without intention", because you have to believe that happen Omi Lola takes the step to "Almeda", perhaps the most commented song since the release of the album and that constitutes the heart of it. The title of the song refers to an area of the south of Houston, and in it, Solange is proud of its braided hair and its, black skin, in addition to its faith in remedies and African-American sauce like Florida water. In it, she works with The-Dream and Playboi Carti.

Also read: 9 songs that will make you feel empowered

The colors of When I Get Home

In "My Skin My Logo," in which she collaborates with Gucci Mane, the album becomes more jazzy with the same elegance of the previous songs. It manages, then, to be pastel while undeniably black. The jazzy dishes continue until "Binz," in which Solange talks about breaking stereotypes of black women and earning money and living comfortably. This part of the album is a little more R & B. Then Solange gets more front and boasts what she has. In "Sound of the Rain" it says "Let's go, nobody givin ', addressing me / So nobody dress can effeminate me / Let's go, nobody taking a joke like me / So nobody dress can effeminate me."

Solange proves that she can be elegant, delicate and also she can be rude and defend her own. His return to Houston is a return and an exploration of the origin but also a look to the future from his past and a reflection on his present. This is a slow and quiet disc. You can hear how each thing, each detail was thought and put in place with the precision of a watchmaker. When I Get Home welcomes us, it is hospitable and comfortable, but it is also proud.

LatinAmerican Post | Juliana Rodríguez Pabón

Translated from "Los colores del nuevo disco de Solange"