For most of his career, the British producer and singer Kwes has done his work in the background. He mixed records for the xx in their early days and produced for his friend Mica Levi, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Mercury award winner Speech Debelle. He was talented enough to catch Damon Albarn’s ear and was one of the musicians selected to travel to the Congo for the DRC Music project, comfortably collaborating without the pressure that comes with being center stage.
The spotlight shifted onto Kwes in 2012 when he released “B_shf_l”, a hyper-endearing R&B song that helped to break him as a solo artist in early 2012. But even after that, Kwes continued to focus on collaboration, working with Bobby Womack and the British songstress Eliza Doolittle as well as staging a series of operas in collaboration with Peroni brewery. Meanwhile, his music itself has ended up in some surprising places, most recently turning up as a sample on Pusha T’s "Who I Am".
Kwes, then, seems capable of working at a faster clip for and with others than he can as a solo artist. His debut album, ilp, has been about four years in the making, partly due to a six or seven month period of creative block. Records that take a long time to make often result in an enormous patchwork of influences and ilp is no exception: the record reflects a whole host of sensibilities, from the pastoral electronica of early Four Tet, to the traditional R&B of Jessie Ware and the delicate production sensibilities of someone like Sampha, as well as more recently absorbed ties to Oneohtrix Point Never and Brian Wilson. On ilp, Kwes is trying to solve a tough creative riddle: How can an experimental producer with a love for so many different styles of music emphasize his earnest, understated songs while still allowing himself the freedom to explore?
One strategy that Kwes employs is the seemingly straightforward pop song, rebuilt from the ground up. This approach is epitomized by “B_shf_l", which appears again here to open the album. The song remains magnificent: its real accomplishment is using the experimental electronic music Kwes favors to recreate and recontextualize the feel of classicist pop. It’s only once you focus pretty closely that you realize “B_shf_l” is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. “Flower” and “Rollerblades” are "B_shf_l"’s cousins, well-meaning pop songs that don’t quite have the snap of that first single.
Kwes combines his two very different skill sets most successfully on the album’s two longest songs, both of them anthemic, metaphysical explorations nestled in thorny, elaborate musical structures. “Cablecar” is an eight minute treatise of found sound and heartbreaking writing, a delicate, difficult song that slowly reveals itself over the course of multiple listens. And “Purplehands” takes its operative idea from the Brian Wilson influence that Kwes has been talking up recently, with an exploration of food and colors serving as an elegant way to talk about love.
But ilp falters on its shorter songs. Kwes frequently talks about the need for restraint and it’s clear that’s something that he struggles with in his own work. His songs have habit of getting mired, or lost entirely within the context of his ambient, occasionally overwrought music. A good example can be found in the transition between “Flower", and “Hives"; The former is a startlingly delicate love song, the latter a static-driven instrumental. Both tracks are worthwhile but they require wholly different modes of listening and the transition from one to the other is off-putting.
The problem with ilp then is that it's not sure what kind of experience it wants to give you, be it pop or ambient, easy or difficult listening. Kwes the singer is too often overwhelmed by Kwes the producer—he places his voice in the background much of the time, allowing instrumental techniques to obscure, rather than illuminate, the subject of his songs. “Broke” is devastating lyrically but while the music adds to the atmosphere at the beginning of the song, the two elements soon lose track of one another. The track loses momentum as a result, and ends up feeling incomplete.
It can feel difficult to criticize an artist as flagrantly sincere and musically talented as Kwes—this is a guy who caps off his debut album with song dedicated to the love between his grandparents, after all. But as it turns out, those two qualities, the earnestness of the lyrics and the shifting quality of the music, combine to eventually thwart ilp’s success*.* Kwes’s gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch that ends up leaving the listner at a loss.
