Skin Town are a duo from L.A. who make intimate, late-hours R&B—that’s the last thing the world needs more of, right? But don’t dismiss them just yet. Nick Turco and Grace Hall take an overused sound palette and still make bewitching, genuinely sexy jams out of it. You might recognize Turco as the synth player for Zola Jesus, while Hall had turns in a number of punk-leaning bands before 808s & Heartbreak stole her heart away. It’s almost too perfect of a scenario, but it helps that they’re both obviously talented; Turco’s synthscapes are huge and scene-stealing, while Hall’s husky voice strikes a glorious medium between Abel Tesfaye and Sade. Together, they’ve crafted a strong debut album that flirts with the hipster-R&B zeitgeist without giving itself away altogether.
The Weeknd’s influence haunts The Room. It’s unavoidable, seeping into the phrasing of the first two tracks, “2Nite” and “The Zone". Fey and rigid at the same time, Hall squeezes syllables into a half-rap, half-sung cadence, letting them fly out in melisma at choice moments; when she commands “get my body on the floor” on the latter, she sounds like she’s doing her best Tesfaye impression. But Skin Town are friendlier than the Weeknd—less lecherous and more melodic—and the band can’t be boiled down to one single comparison. The rest of the time Hall sounds like no one but herself, and she’s a stunningly skilled singer who can try on the phrasing of the best of ‘em whenever she needs a quick thrill. That’s not even mentioning Turco, who blesses “2Nite” with synths that strike the backdrop like 3D glacier shards, appropriating the unnaturally bright sounds of vapourwave.
For all the hallmarks they borrow from the public consciousness, there are plenty of moments on The Room that are all theirs. Hall’s cascading vocals on “Rain” are unforgettable over Turco’s surging synths, like a trance track stuck in neutral. “Hit Down,” meanwhile, zooms in on an aspect of 90s R&B that’s too often forgotten, with a loose trip-hop style beat that’s somewhere between SWV and Spice Girls. “Ice Crystal Palace” is a gilded ballad full of lovesick instrumentation and larger-than-life adult contemporary synths, while the album winds down with its dramatic title track, where big booming drums compete with vamping funk leads.
The duo are still learning their way around songwriting, however. “Ride” is essentially a series of irresistible hooks each launching off the momentum of the last, The-Dream style, over one of the album’s most minimal beats. But then there’s the chorus—“Ride him like a bike/ Ride him like a bike” and elsewhere “Got me greased up babe/ Feel it deep inside”—which is startlingly blunt but way too graphic to be sexy. (This is coming from a band called Skin Town, after all.) Hall’s boldness is a large part of the album’s appeal, but it’s sometimes misplaced, like the halfhearted rapping in "Throwin' Shade", an attempt to sound menacing that comes off completely inert.
Minor flaws aside, the ground that Skin Town manage to cover on their debut is remarkable. Their album comes on Time No Place, the L.A. label home to acts like Nguzunguzu, Rainbow Arabia and Coyote Clean Up, all artists who take various reference points and make pop culture soup out of them, usually in a way very slanted towards the electronic music world. Which puts Skin Town in an strange position—they're clearly an R&B group, but they could easily be marketed as electronic auteurs with a good singer. However you take them, it's hard to deny that they make a great pair, and though they're still a little wet behind the ears, The Room shows that the past two years' explosion in gothic-tinted R&B has some healthy fruits to bear after all.
