“Say it with your chest,” aja monet commands in the opening seconds of the color of rain. The phrase, popularized by an old Kevin Hart bit, tends to be a taunt, but monet freaks it. With growing vim, she likens a chest to an engine waiting to be fired, the cavity within to a “darling darkness,” the heart to a tenderly cupped firefly—each metaphor diluting the machismo of the saying. By the time monet repeats the expression at the end of her verse, chanting it gently as pitter-pattering drums and hushed keys subsume her voice, “say it with your chest” is more spell than jeer, a mantra for staying true to self.
monet goes full high priestess on her second album, a liquid set that shapeshifts like a trickster god. Over fizzling jazz, soul, and electronic arrangements that sway from calm to chaos, she moves fluidly between registers and genres, her performances more emphatically musical even as her style remains rooted in slam poetry. These tracks are as tuneful and rollicking as they are stately, poems to sing along with and groove to. monet is a bard now, a level-up that unlocks her alchemical lyricism.
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Spoken word recordings often try to approximate the spaces where poetry is performed: Voices are centered, music and audience chatter pushed to the edge of the mix. The poem feels enclosed. the color of rain rejects that standard. These restless arrangements—produced by monet, polymath bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, and virtuoso drummer Justin Brown with assists from trumpeter Nico Segal and engineer Chris Connors—push outward. The instrumentals nudge, stretch, and press, the layered rhythms and background vocals in constant conversation with monet’s slick poetics. If songs are rooms, these are under construction: warm, expanding, a little noisy.
monet builds on the syncretic style she introduced on when the poems do what they do. Where that record drew heavily from the sounds of the Black Arts Movement, the color of rain reaches a bit farther. The songwriting channels the Los Angeles jazz and beat scenes, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe diaspora, and the experimental sound collages of artists like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts. These influences are subtle though, the connections tangled like roots.
Reminiscent of a wooly Blood Orange record, there’s a gamesome way to how the songs come together. Georgia Anne Muldrow might show up to sing (“elsewhere”) or play the kazoo (“i know that i don’t know.”) A clacking typewriter might be the sole instrument (“i came to the poem”). Backbeats thunder in, then sputter out. That anything-goes feeling is amplified by monet’s wayward metaphors. “The carnival of flowers sprouting from closed fists/Earth-skinned/The perfume of stones kissin’ cuss words/The rhythm, echo, and reverb, riffin’,” she intones on “elsewhere,” capturing the adventurous, free-wheeling mood.
Her writing is grounded and mystic, often zeroing in on common images and injecting them with wonder. Sharing a room with loved ones makes her feel like “the color of rain.” A miracle is “a muscle we practice.” Silence among lovers is “a garden of breath.” Black skin, the subject of the soothing “skinfolk,” is “The color of Garvey’s Star Line/Or Nina’s fearless freedom/A sheet of obsidian silk/Moonbeams hollering.” And impressively the lyrics are just half the story. The engine of the record, the chest if you will, is monet’s expanded vocal repertoire.
