A Love Surreal is only the third studio album Bilal has managed in 12 years, a remarkable fact that testifies to a career marked primarily by speed bumps and absences. These days, he's known more as a guest or hired session gun than a solo artist and A Love Surreal feels very much like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations: jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic, and completely without high-profile guests (unless you count young jazz iconoclast Robert Glasper as such). A Love Surreal breathes some of the same insular oxygen as Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?, another effort by someone who had figured out that he wasn't ever going to be a marquee star, and, with a shrug, closed his studio door to the outside world.
Recorded in live, spontaneous-sounding takes, A Love Surreal is a long, liquid suite, shifting through long instrumental sections during which Bilal is doing nothing but crooning wordlessly, doubling and tripling his voice into freely rippling layers. That doesn't mean it's boring or static. The mix is filled with tiny surprising sounds-- a high, pulsing keyboard whines in your head on "Winning Hand"; dusty, boxy drum programming throughout that recalls the napkin-doodle electronics taking up the back half of Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information. There are guitars everywhere-- acoustic and sun-dappled on "Lost for Now", electric and bluesy on "Astray", stabbing Steve Cropper leads on "Winning Hand". On "West Side Girl", they clump together like wet tissues while Bilal multitracks his voice into dizzying layers around them: His harmonized vocals stack behind the verses, and the foreground is flooded with breathing, moaning, muttering, exclaiming, and whispering. He seems to gravitate naturally to smaller-scale, more granular moments like these, which make A Love Surreal mandatory headphone listening.
His sense of melody remains compellingly strange, his harmonic ear bent permanently by operatic and jazz training and his reverence towards decades of atmosphere-first psychedelic-soul LPs. A Love Surreal is short on big, arcing-rainbow melodies as a result, but one of its joys is watching Bilal warp his voice into improbable shapes: nasally and needling on "Longing and Waiting", Donny Hathaway-expansive on "Slipping Away"; "7"-era Prince raspy on "West Side Girl" and "Astray". On "Butterfly," the Robert Glasper collaboration, he lets his voice shoot into a startlingly unbounded falsetto, one that feels like it could plausibly keep climbing and climbing. The song has nothing but Glasper's free, shimmering piano and some drowsy guitar effects to mark its edges. It never ceases to be captivating.
There is very little on A Love Surreal to suggest that Bilal has his ear cocked to what is happening to the R&B landscape around him. There are no rap guest spots, despite Bilal's reliable presence on the other side of the "ft." on a decade's worth of indie-rap albums. Calling in favors doesn't seem to interest him. Having outlasted the "next D'Angelo" tag that hung on his earliest work and weathered a decade in the solo artist wilderness, Bilal seems to have found his sweet spot somewhere between "hired session gun" and "weirdo auteur."
