At some point during the past year or so, adult contemporary R&B became au courant—blame nostalgia, blame retromania, blame folks in their twenties jonesing for the music they loved when they were eight—and it’s been disorienting. Some good can come of this: smashing up the canon, rediscovering some classics that got left out of pop culture’s ongoing "I Love the '90s"*-*ization, recognizing that Diane Warren is actually kind of a national treasure. Some good albums have come of it too—Solange’s True, Jessie Ware’s Tough Love, Dornik’s self-titled. But this stuff is harder than it sounds. Done right, you salvage everything timeless and nocturnal about the genre and leave the fustiness behind. Done wrong, you’ve written more of the filler songs you’d have found buried around track 12 of a Monica album, or the ballads that used to be near-contractual requirements for pop starlets needing "mature" cuts for their records.
Enter Wet, a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them, which nevertheless positions them perfectly for starring roles in Baby’s All Right showcases, BBC Radio 1 playlists, and hair-whipping clips on Khloe Kardashian’s Instagram. (This is how we 2016.) The uninformed listener might think Wet would be fun. Their band name may or may not be a gag. Their former online presence, squashed for legal reasons, was @kanyewet—it’s goofy! It’s Yeezy! It’s maybe a grab for those typo clicks, if you want to get all cynical about it! Debut album Don’t You, however, is a downbeat, decidedly unfun affair—this is the kind of album where early single "U Da Best" turns into "You’re the Best," from which you can extrapolate a lot.
The main problem with Don’t You: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them once. Wet cite Usher and SWV as touchpoints in almost every press story, but seem to have forgotten all their exciting songs, as well as everything uptempo; most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good. Instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow reproduce the slick sounds of background music—synth pads, polite rhythm guitar, vague drum pitter-patter—with sample-replay fidelity. Vocalist Kelly Zutrau’s thin voice has none of the sighing wispiness of Romy Madley-Croft, Tracey Thorn, or even Jennifer Paige, nor the melisma or force of basically any R&B artist Don’t You emulates; her go-to tricks are (admittedly pretty and sometimes inspired) double-tracked harmonies or a Banks-y quaver that’s plaintive the first couple times you hear it. Their songs are near-identical takes on the wallow phase of a breakup, each rendered in passive, beige indifference—one misses the emotional peaks of '90s R&B, which go all the way up to "If You Died I Wouldn’t Cry." Yet telling-not-showing lines like "when you hold me, I still feel lonely" (responsible for perhaps the best/worst Genius annotation in recent memory) are nevertheless preferable to the likes of "today, New York feels like an island," a metaphor that manages the remarkable feat of being clichéd and geographically hilarious. (Perhaps they meant upstate?)
Don’t You isn’t without standouts. "Deadwater" is well-constructed, though better as a standalone single, and skittery "All the Ways" is a standout purely by dint of having a higher tempo. But two-for-eleven does not an album make. "Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl" drowns Brian McKnight’s "Back at One" and Cat Power’s "Good Woman" in a puddle of reverb and repetition. "Weak" is an approximation of what it might sound like if Meghan Trainor traded her poodle-skirt-costume versions of the '50s for roller-rink-costume versions on "Waterfalls." Either everyone involved with "You’re the Best" developed iron deficiencies before its re-recording, or it simply blends in with the rest of the album’s downtempo sulk.
Wet, to their credit and detriment, know they’ve got competition. "Our music plays into the more general trend of artists incorporating certain elements of R&B and pop into their sound and creating something really unique," Zutrau told Interview. But of those on-trend artists, Haim have more exuberance and better studio players; the xx have more space and ambition; almost any contemporary R&B act has more imagination, more rhythm, and more interesting blues. Wet know this too: "[We’re] now adults in a time when the music playing on Hot 97 is some of the most exciting music being made right now," Zutrau said. Perhaps the future might capture a bit of that excitement; some names floated as future Wet collaborators include Clams Casino (whose "Weak" remix is more sonically interesting alone than anything on this record) and Drake producer Nineteen85. As it stands, Wet may as well be directing readers toward better versions of them. And there have never been more to choose from.
