Bilal ‘A Love Surreal’ Album Review
It’s a bit funky and often psychedelic. The opener sounds like the score to a disjointed, but beautiful dream. It’s a little old school, but deeply layered and informed by modern music and technique. At times it can be very, very subtle. A Love Surreal is exactly the sort of record that nobody buys.
A truly stellar, Thundercat-powered bass comes into the mix on ‘West Side Girl’, making a strong case for commercial success. The song is a kind of mixture of a classic funk groove augmented by what sound like text message alerts, while Bilal sings of feigned insecurity and picking up women. Stephen ‘Thundercat’ Bruner is one of a select few collaborators who might go unnoticed on this album, but whose presence is no less deeply felt.
For Bilal, who is a consummate featured performer on a myriad hiphop tracks, to put this album together without any high-profile rappers backing him up should speak to his vision; he was inspired more by Salvador Dali than the Billboard Hot 100. Most R&B these days feels forced to exist within the hiphop world, which it honestly has to do to in order to move units, and this is why A Love Surreal will not. It feels intimate, like Bilal wrote and recorded the whole thing on one tortured, introspective night in the summer.
The album snakes its way through the seasons of love. ‘Back To Love’ is a beautiful and romantic ballad disguised as something a little bit stronger, with punching bass and drums that exude confidence more than sincerity. This album distances itself from other modern R&B by not being so straightforward all of the time, and by focusing very firmly on romance over pure sexuality. In all things Bilal and co. add a dash of mystery, because how could one fall in love without that key ingredient?
There is also a lot of subtlety in the sounds, so you’ll need a good set of speakers or headphones to really appreciate it. Bilal’s voice is very often layered with itself in beautiful sonic rainbows that can be hard to pick up on, which is also true of the little breaths and moans used percussively in some places, or the depth of instrumentation.
‘Right At the Core’ has a psychedelic ambience that is thick and heavy, not an LSD-inspired trip, and if you want advice from somebody who hasn’t smoked a joint in six years it probably works best with a mild indica. It’s a very special song on this record, which might make it feel out of place just as much as a highlight. It makes sense that you can hear a shift in tone at this point, as the seasons continue to change and romance heads towards inevitable mourning.
‘Slipping Away’ begins as Bilal’s official Bond theme, and a damn good one. It slowly builds into something much more than that, though, with guitars that cry and wail right alongside Bilal, whose vocal performance here is the best on the record. His voice is incredibly versatile, never perfect but always beautiful, whether nearly whispering or screaming out in desperation. He can be as smooth as butter or as gritty as an ashtray, and there comes a time for all shapes and textures on this record.
One song stands out as kind of weird, if only for its plainness. ‘Lost For Now’ is a departure from the rest of the album, a pop rock song which would fit into catalogs like The Smiths, or perhaps even more accurately, Smiths-cover-band-turned-indie-vangrants, The Dears. It’s a good song, but it doesn’t blend very well with the album’s otherwise underwater, murky textures, even if that’s the point, like waking from the dream of love.
The only other complaint I have about this record– and it’s a minor gripe– is that many of the songs seem to collapse right at the end as if Bilal was trying to avoid fadeouts but didn’t really have anything better in mind, either. It can make the transitions slightly jarring, but the album no less has a good flow and feels cohesive. It’s only for those split seconds that things are a bit off.
A Love Surreal might be too weird for R&B fans, and too R&B for everyone else, but hopefully it finds a comfortable home in some segment of pop consciousness because it is a truly great record. Nobody is going to buy it, but this one was born to be a cult favorite.