Kelela is an intellectual in search of the body high. During the bountiful era of her early 30s, she has become exceptionally aware of the way club tracks work best when tuned to the head and the heart. Her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, remains a hallmark of the genre, a moment when the next-level producers of Night Slugs and Fade to Mind found a unified center within Kelela’s sinewy vocals. On 2015’s Hallucinogen EP, she further proved herself as an extraordinary ear and songwriter, guiding her producer-collaborators to push further into uncharted, futuristic territory. And on Take Me Apart, her first studio album, she takes the cerebral, corporeal world she’s built into the domain where it can historically live best: a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers.
Take Me Apart is a document of the emotional mechanics of a break-up and the freeing nature of new love. Kelela luxuriates in this radical openness between the two. On the title track, a sex jam produced by Al Shux and Jam City that hovers in the silky realm between drum ’n’ bass and rhythm & quad. Kelela demands a partner explore her entirely before getting all mushy about it—“Don’t say you’re in love, baby,” she coos, “until you learn to take me apart.” She advocates the exploration of her bod in the context of practicality—the need to unite the purely physical with one’s own damn brain.
The song is as much a statement about her music as it is about lusty night sweats, a theme that underpins Take Me Apart with an earned confidence. Her voice is clearer than ever, and she’s mastered its lower reaches and its breathy, Janet-invoking croons; on “Blue Light,” another song in which she asserts her desire to put it down with a new lover, she explores her vocal range with awesome muscularity. “I’m on my way right now, promise I won’t be long,” she sings, “Baby, keep the blue light on.” A pulsing, grime-adjacent synth by Dubbel Dutch acts as her pep squad, and the whole affair ends up feeling appropriately backlit, a bit illicit, and totally determined. You wanna dance and fuck to it.
Like Björk did in her early solo days, Take Me Apart provides a template for how to innovate pop, incorporating a melange of influences—writing collaborators include the xx’s Romy Madley Croft, Brazilian Girls’ Sabina Sciubba, and Nguzunguzu’s Asma Maroof—while remaining divorced from the endless industry zeitgeist of big-name algorithm producers. What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing. “Frontline,” which premiered on an episode of “Insecure” and seamlessly blended into the show’s estimation of break-ups in millennial Los Angeles, is a cinematic document in and of itself. As she avails herself of a shitty relationship (“Cry and talk about it baby but it ain’t no use/I ain’t gonna sit here with your blues”), a joint crackles, keys jingle, a car alarm beeps off, an engine revs. It’s completely transportive, and the most visual example of an album that seeks to create a world of her own.
Of course, there are pop-history touchstones—a strategically placed “ay” on “Waitin” invokes the glory days of crunk & b; songs like “Enough” and “Onanon,” both Arca joints, are like if Windy & Carl were fully psyched on modern DIY raves. But as Kelela canvasses the vagaries of her relationships, spreading her wings high atop the peaks of her soprano voice, she builds this outbound world to reflect the richness of her prodigious interior. Within this space, she flourishes as a songwriter, precise without hemming herself in.
Because of this, on an album full of jeep-jouncing bangers, it’s perhaps the most minimal tracks that land the hardest. On “Bluff,” her breezy vibrato chills on a slow piano melody, and she sings as though she’s telling a secret. “There you go, holding onto something. I’m gonna prove you wrong. Here we go, jumping in the deep end. I’m gonna prove you wrong.” It’s just over a minute long, but it’s evidence her heart is true: the song reverberates with tenderness, a prevailing theme for an album that documents falling in and out of love. She might be singing about different partners, but it’s the value and dignity she gives to her feelings that provides the true backdrop on Take Me Apart. In the process of setting out to solidify her own sound, Kelela has finally fallen for herself.
