Last Friday, in order to celebrate the release of his first solo album, Mind of Mine, Zayn performed the bonus track "LIKE I WOULD" on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon." He was assisted by the Roots and surrounded by fluorescent tubes, but he looked alone and slightly lost, his eyes gazing blankly ahead. Since he left One Direction a year ago, there’s an awkwardness and inflexibility visible in his performances, as if he’s just learning how to occupy a stage on his own. When he sings the chorus, "He-eeee / won’t touch you like I do," he starts to loosen up, giving a few rhythmic shrugs and meaningful gazes at the middle distance, but as a solo star he moves through space unsteadily.
In One Direction, Zayn contributed a distinct, introspective personality, the pleasing and elastic geometry of his hair, a capable falsetto, and an emotional reserve which contrasted tastefully with the adolescent exuberance of his bandmates. On his own, uninterrupted by four other voices, his vocal can sound shapeless, with his vowels collapsing into mumbled piles of feeling. His highly anticipated solo album is state-of-the-art amorphous R&B, Frank Ocean and Miguel-indebted stuff that swerves in and out of focus like headlights through a fog. But his voice doesn't stand out in it, and on fussy, textured songs like "tRuTh" and "BoRdErSz," he's just an additional cloud in a misty atmosphere.
In sparer, more reduced arrangements you can hear him strain; "fOoL fOr YoU" is a Beatles pastiche, just piano and drums and Zayn, and his voice sounds pinched and exposed. He sounds lovely on "sHe" and "dRuNk," incidentally the most assured songs on the record. There’s a dexterity to "sHe" that seems vacuumed out of the rest of the album, his vocal moving nimbly among blurred pulses of guitar and inverted piano clusters. When he unleashes his falsetto, it pierces the track, a crystal tower rising through the surface of the earth. It’s the only instant on Mind of Mine that seems to hint at his actual capacity for pop artistry. There’s also something gorgeous and spectral to his voice on the intermission, "fLoWeR," which is sung entirely in Urdu; he snaps with ease into the perpendicular arrangement of notes.
As a document of his metamorphosis, from goofy teen idol to humorless R&B singer, Mind of Mine is mostly unsuccessful. It’s not as secure or as nimble as Justin Timberlake’s Justified, and it lacks the three sublime and thermochromic singles of Justin Bieber’s Purpose. The album is so certain of what kind of adulthood it wants to convey that it often ends up expressing an amplified parody of it. The lyrics are hyper-focused on types of haze (drunk or drugged) and heterosexual sex; blustery lead single "PILLOWTALK" seems reverse-engineered from Zayn singing the word "fucking," a glossy wrought-iron context for an elementary school transgression. In the closing track "TiO" he sings "You get off on me / it's like cheating," which is likely intended to sound provocative and sexy but comes off, like the majority of sexual encounters on the record, as dour and joyless. (A clutch of Zayn-era One Direction tracks have a more whimsical and dynamic vision of sex, particularly "No Control," in which they seem super-psyched to have done it with someone cool.)
The bonus tracks expand the dimensions of the album. "BLUE" would seem Zayn’s attempt at a Coldplay-esque ballad if it approached any sort of resolution or climax; instead it just hovers nervously at half-altitude. These uncertain moments are the most compelling ones, perhaps because they feel truest to Zayn's tentative solo presence. Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated*.* Great solo pop careers are usually born when the performer figures out what space they want to claim and leave enough room for the listener to join them, but Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular.
