Approximately 300 hours of video is uploaded onto YouTube every minute. A significant portion of that 300 hours is probably made up of webcam videos and acoustic covers. It’s a hallmark of the site, a rite of passage for any teenager with an acoustic guitar. It’s also how Abra, an Atlanta based singer/producer got her start. Around six years ago, she started uploading covers of rap and R&B and indie rock songs onto her YouTube page. Her choices ran the gamut from Gucci Mane to Radiohead; in her most popular video, a cover Waka Flocka’s “No Hands,” she layers the song with multiple recordings of an a capella track of her own voice presumably playing from laptop speakers. She misses her cues, perhaps purposefully, giving the cover a cleverly messy style. Unbeknownst to her at first, these videos somehow got in the hands of Father, rapper and founder of Awful Records. They were both students at Georgia State at the time, and on the urging of him and the other artists in the Awful collective at GS, she started to pursue making original music.
She shared her first piece of original music two years ago, a YouTube upload called “Needsumbody.” The song was a shuffling ’80s- inspired piece of alt-pop, endearingly rough-and-tumble in quality. The mix was characteristically scattershot, her voice uneven but louder than the other elements, hissing ambient echoes and muted drums. Its muddy and moody quality recalled the acerbic gurgle of King Krule or the smeared-lens experiments of How to Dress Well. It’s not meant to sound beautiful in any way, but her music instead gathers together all the fraying signifiers of bedroom pop: essentially an Instagram filter for music that wants to be asymmetrical and fashionably color outside the lines.
This song, and almost everything she’s released (two mixtapes with Awful) since, has been self-produced, and recorded in her Atlanta bedroom closet. This includes her most recent release, an EP called Princess (her first major label release) which bears a strong stylistic quality to even her earliest work, including the acoustic covers of rap songs. A sense of perfect imperfection unifies all of her work, which, for better or worse is an attitude that doesn’t work for Abra.
Princess is a short piece of music, less than thirty minutes long. It’s more a progress report on Abra’s growth than a fully fleshed-out release. As such, its similarity to so much of her early work is, if not damning, then a little disappointing. From the opening moments of the EP to its closing second, what you can expect is a uniform sound built from bright, impressionistic drum machines and warm synths. In the EP’s opener “Come 4 Me,” she uses the same vocal layering technique she used in the Waka Flocka cover, albeit with more skill. In the next song “Vegas,” she ratchets up the ’80s facsimile, slathering on the 808 brushstrokes. Her voice gets lost in the murky collage of noises, and when brief snatches of her words bob up to the surface, they can be funny in their cliche (“If you wanna roll the dice on me okay/If you think you can afford it/Come play”).
Her music has been compared by critics in the past to Janet Jackson “demos,” a kind of backhanded compliment implying that the quality of her sound and skill is meant to live in a dusty archive until the light of day deems it necessary to be uncovered yet again. At its best, this EP looks like a creatively executed painting done by numbers. All the markers of homemade alt-R&B are colored in, but it makes the product at least a little rote. Those vintage sounds and the underdog spirit of bedroom DIY, are, at this point, aesthetic presets. Behind the nostalgic tropes, there is a confident and self-possessed artist waiting to get out. But it’s a little hard to hear in the cramped space of a bedroom closet.
