If you're given the task of trying to parse all the guises, collaborations, phases, and detours of Georgia Anne Muldrow's relatively young, relentless career as a singer and composer, well, good luck. This is an artist whose spirit of independence has scattered her presence over as many contexts as her psychedelic, jazz-inflected neo-soul sensibility can carry her-- an R&B auteur with a 24/7 omnipresence. You might've heard her on a Stones Throw compilation, or building the lush melodic backbone of Mos Def's The Ecstatic track "Roses", or forming a mutual-muse partnership with the off-kilter but sincere g-funk crooner Dudley Perkins, or sweetening up albums by Oddisee or Shawn Lee or Oh No. If you're lucky, you've pulled up a couple of her albums, weathering occasional bouts of formative inconsistency to savor the Nina Simone-indebted gems off releases like Kings Ballad or Owed to Mama Rickie. Defining her solely through any individual one of those works is clearly incomplete, but taking in the big picture of her output reveals more about her restless creative evolution than any easy synopsis.
Seeds is another left-field deviation in Muldrow's career: it's one of her most captivating and immediate front-to-back statements of purpose as a singer, but it's also the first album where she's handed over all the production duties to somebody else. That this somebody else is Madlib is a good hook, and his most prominent R&B production job prior to this one-- two excellent songs on Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War-- makes for an optimistic precedent. It's one he fills with a relatively understated smoothness, rolling out his more classic-soul-influenced side to subtle effect. This isn't the Madlib of Firesign Theatre clips, damaged-filmstrip horns, and resin-caked surface hiss; it's the one that put the buttery Stacy Epps feature "Eye" on Madvillainy and rode the bliss of Roy Ayers' slow jam "DC City" on Quasimoto's "Seasons Change". The beats on Seeds are characteristically weathered, peppered with abrupt truncated loops and instilled with a familiar sense of hard-wrought excavation. But they still come at you head-on with no tricks or punchlines, whether they lift cues from stretched-taut funk ("Kali Yuga") or sleek vintage drum machine R&B ("Best Love"). They help make the album click, but they don't take over the spotlight.
That gives Muldrow a comfortable space to do what makes her so compelling: grab a simple phrase, mull it over, turn it into a mantra-like refrain, and bend it from every melodic angle she can find. Seeds has a wide theme of existential reflection-- hoping for a better environment for our children (the environmentally conscious title track), wondering how our legacies will be remembered ("Wind"), and finding a sense of communal identity and pride through the birth of a child ("The Birth of Petey Wheatstraw"). It's deeply spiritual, not in some superficial hippy-dip way, but in the sense of someone working through profound ideas of worry and praise. She's an evocative wordsmith when she wants to be, like when she's referring to the state of hesitant apprehension as "kneecap jelly" in the resilient self-sufficiency anthem of the same name. But taking a simple observation or a plain truth and breathing her own life into it makes her lyrics a solid means to a stronger end, simple sayings ("you and me, we can make a difference if we try"; "original man divine") given a third (and fourth) dimension through her voice. She lets slip a few slyly showoffy vocal tricks, like the simultaneously full-throated and quiet interjections of a couple mid-chorus cathartic screams in "Kali Yuga", that fall somewhere between the paired thrills of "because I want to" and "because I can." And through the refined multi-tracking that boosts her signal, there's this dense, rich, self-call-and-response room-of-mirrors trickery that amplifies the recursive contemplation of her words and the open emotions behind them. If it seems like she's in love with the sound of her own voice, hey, why not? It's easy to love.
