The most startling aspect of Diddy and Dirty Money's "Ass on the Floor" was not its liberal use of the militaristic snare loop from Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor", but how that loop was melded so successfully to the tearjerking R&B harmonies of Dirty Money members Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper. I suspect this was the ideological heart of Diddy's Dirty Money project: an insistence that R&B's sonic adventurism and its emotional intensity are in a relationship of mutual necessity, each offering a frame through which the other can be perceived in its best light. Dirty Money is apparently defunct now, but Richard has absorbed, and built on, its aesthetic to the point where she can match or even surpass the heights of 2010's Last Train to Paris, the project's sole album release.
Where Last Train came on like a glittering chorus line of guest stars, electronic costumes, and emotional poses, Dawn's solo work is rigorously private and individual. Last year's mixtape A Tell Tale Heart was modern R&B stripped to its essentials, with almost every song built around muscular rhythm tracks and layers of Dawn's vocals. Dawn's voice often resembles that of a more accomplished Brandy, combining swooping harmonies with a spare central vocal frequently on the verge of choking up. It's as if everything in her music can be divided between the absolutes of the aggressively mechanical and the nakedly, vulnerably human.
Dawn's new release Armor On is billed as an EP, but its 36-minute expanse is longer than many albums and more impactful than most. The collection makes the contrast between the mechanical and the human its central theme, aspiring to steely invincibility as an escape from the frailties of the flesh, with the constant danger of placing one's happiness in the hands of another. Dawn and her producer Druski-- who's responsible for all but one of the tracks here-- frequently turn to dance music in order to express this contrast, but Armor On largely eschews the banging wall-of-sound approach of contemporary dance-pop. Instead, its vision of dance music is one of vast, grandiose structures anchored by persistent repetition, like a vow of survival or fidelity in a rainstorm.
On "Black Lipstick", quicksilver drum'n'bass beats are deployed like landmines, tripped by the twists and turns of this deeply ambivalent song of obsession. I'm guessing that for Dawn the appeal of drum'n'bass is less the accelerated tempo than its facility for layering rhythms to create a sense of ever-deepening complexity and force. This approach matches her vocals, building into complex tapestries of interwoven harmonies, while the songs plummet toward a melodramatic core of regret, of abandon, of anger-- the tenor of the emotions may change, but the intensity is a constant. "Black Lipstick" may be more unexpected, but the by turns sensuous and haunting ballads "Scripture" and "Save Me From U (Remix)" are similarly accomplished and seductive.
Surprisingly, Dawn's distance from the compressed build-up/break-down cycles of commercial dance pop carries over to Armor On's house-influenced tracks. On the devotional "Change", a syncopated kickdrum groove gathers percussive snare rolls around it like fairy floss, until the song's percussive density becomes unbearable (echoing Dawn's romantic absolutism: "If he was religion, I'd be the faith," she declares, sounding like she's watching her lover's execution), while on "Heaven" a seductive tabla-sampling house groove becomes submerged like a fossilized imprint under successive layers of pummeling drums. Even "Faith", the EP's one concession to contemporary R&B mores, is a masterpiece of build, spiraling ever upward toward an anthemic, explosive release.
Dawn's stylistic promiscuity may be Armor On's key talking point, but its most remarkable quality is its essential unity, always returning to her vacillations of defiance and surrender in the face of love's promise and its deceptions. "I feel so artificial when loving you," she accuses a callous, uncaring lover over the rigid robo-groove of "Automatic", then sighs, "I wanna be human…" Her dilemma remains endlessly sympathetic, but it's hard not to hope she remains stuck in this bind when the results are so spectacular.
