For the past few years, Wiley's seemed pretty torn over the direction his career should take. He can't seem to decide whether he wants to be a boisterous patriot for underground UK urban music or a showbiz cat unafraid of his crossover ambitions. On Chill Out Zone's "If I Could", he raps about keeping his music raw and personal while still being able to get it into the charts. It's the kind of sentiment you'd expect from a guy who abandoned his major label for a second chance at the indie life, right after his biggest success with "Wearing My Rolex", which fell just shy of topping the UK charts in 2008. But it's also kind of hard to square this "might blow up but won't go pop" attitude with R&B cat Ed Sheeran mewling pleasantly on the song's chorus, especially when you consider the stark beats and alien basslines that first brought Wiley to fame.
Ever since his old crew Roll Deep first flirted with the UK Top Ten in 2005, Wiley's been trying on and off to mix grime's twisted low-end theories with the accessibility of R&B, synth-pop, even music hall comedy. Chill Out Zone is his most blatant attempt yet at blending the rough with the smooth, the grimly reflective and the purely pleasurable. There are some beautiful low-key moments, and a few nods to grime's cybernetic fierceness. But most of these cuts are built around synth hooks as bright and immediate as anything you'll find in the work of 1980s-obsessed house producers like Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, even as the lyrics get seriously, painfully emo at times.
It makes for a strange if not always entirely unpleasant mix: soul-searching rap over sugar-coated beats. A self-released EP long enough to really be called an album, it's easy to understand why Big Dada, devoted to left-field tweaks on traditional hip-hop, might not have been interested in Chill Out Zone. Musically it's probably pretty close to the album Wiley's old label, Asylum, was hoping he'd make after See Clear Now, a slick and sumptuous short set of prettified pop tunes. Co-produced by Jay Weathers, the beats on Chill Out Zone are indeed uniformly great. The swoon of "Get Up", where they blend the best bits from ambient jungle and synthetic 80s soul music, is as gorgeous a track as any producer's made this year, in any genre. It's just too bad the record's behind-the-boards brilliance is so often obscured by Wiley's surprisingly sluggish rapping and the uniformly lame R&B choruses appended to half the songs.
A lot of the zip and wit has always drained out of Wiley's voice when he's decided to get serious. Even when the music's light and airy, too many cuts on Chill Out Zone find him droning on with surprising self-pity about the perils of fame, thwarted success, his hood credentials, and accusations of selling out. With a backing track that resembles late 80s Steve Winwood as much as anything, "She Might Holla" is one of the few cuts where Wiley-the-rapper sounds like he's having any fun, like a guy who actually should be rapping over these unabashedly pop beats. As for the guest singers, they range from adequate to grating, but even the decent ones flop because none of their vocal hooks can match the keyboards for exuberance or memorability. For fans and beat freaks, Chill Out Zone is worth snagging for the shimmering backing tracks and the moments when Wiley bothers to come to life behind the mic. But if you're only going to grab one new Wiley album in 2011, the far more committed and energetic 100% Publishing, released just a month ago, is still the one to get.
