One of these days there'll be the definitive retrospective written about how Kelis somehow managed both a solid run of great songs and an impenetrable run of rotten luck. We're 15 years out from the cult-hit success of Kaleidoscope and “Caught Out There", more than 10 years since “Milkshake” hit #3 on the Hot 100, and four years since the ahead-of-the-curve electro/house-leaning Flesh Tone left her with a one-and-done Interscope run that remains one of pop's lingering “how did this get overlooked?” mysteries. Every few years it seems like she's had to find a new voice and a new audience to go with it.
In that respect, even a move like getting Dave Sitek to produce your album on a label best known for Amon Tobin isn't excessively out-of-nowhere. The chameleonic nature of Kelis' voice and her versatility in sonic roles ranging from vintage Neptunes to Raphael Saadiq to David Guetta is her biggest strength, one that's sustained her throughout a career filled with unfair perceptions of her as a producer's plug-in. Sitek, meanwhile, gave Kelis the potential to fit her way into another side of her style and personality that could expand her repertoire—that of the contemporary NYC-native internationalist, the big-in-Europe star rerooted to the Harlem of her youth and reconciling it with the art-school upbringing that made her one of pop's likeliest indie-crossover candidates.
And it should've gone so much better. Food shows Kelis in unusual form—ragged, raspy, somewhere between exhausted from effort and deep in reflection. It's definitely not the tough, coyly defiant, independently minded kick-in-the-ass that her top-flight vocal performances made famous, though there are still flashes of it for emphasis. At its best, there's a touch of Tina-in0'84 snarl to it, a seen-some-shit weariness that doubles back and draws on itself to reinforce her voice's strength. It brings out the sweetly nostalgic tint to super-earworm leadoff single “Jerk Ribs", the deeper-than-deep long-distance yearning in Labi Siffre cover/Tunde Adebimpe duet “Bless the Telephone", and the maternal lessons-learned wisdom in “Hooch” (which slyly invokes an epochal line from her ex Nas: “Like your daddy said, the world is yours/ So let it flow naturally”). Even if it's a hard sell going to some of the hooks a few too many times—especially when they're as lyrically noncommittal as the placeholder-quality “Gimme what I want/ Gimme what I need/ I'm beggin' you please/ I'm down on my knees” refrain of “Friday Fish Fry”—it's striking to hear a voice you thought might've been familiar over the previous five albums given a new rendition.
If the occasional lapses in songwriting are forgivable, the backgrounding of Kelis' voice is a lot harder to overlook. That new, strange rasp of hers is subsumed under layers of Sitek studio trickery: pushed back by horn sections when it should be riffing off them, given reverb that makes her sound more blurry than ethereal, multitracked or given backup harmonies in a way that dulls the intriguing edges of her voice. Even if the “Bless the Telephone” cover isn't the most characteristic or innovative cut, it's at least the most complementary—just her, Tunde, and an acoustic guitar all meshing together in a way just as striking as her younger self careening through Pharrell's digital Tilt-a-Whirl. For most of the remainder of Food, she seems adrift, distantly in the middle of nowhere even as she's surrounded by orchestration on all sides.
Sitek's smooth-Afropop and soul-adjacent palette largely lets the album down here, too. I'm not kidding when I point out that “Jerk Ribs” is as catchy a pop concoction as anything someone of the 21st Century indiesphere has done, the sort of buoyant interplay of slinky bass-percussion rapport and joyously martial brass this kind of windows-down-sunroof-open vibe demands. But the majority of the album sinks into an indistinct mellow R&B feint that falls dangerously close to a soundtrack for young attractive people beaming down at smartphones during a "Mad Men" ad break. It's to Kelis' boundless credit that she can make the twee screw of “Floyd” or the passive attack trip-hop of “Runnin” feel warmly human just by doing her best to overpower it—even as the music tries, and nearly succeeds, in overpowering her.
