The London-based singer/producer Kwes has the kind of personality you used to find all the time in old-school R&B but that you rarely find now: courtly, tender, sensitive, self-effacing, romantic. "I'm so bashful," he sings over a song named for the shy emotion, right before he actually offers the girl in question a cream soda. He's not a twee, toe-digging type, however: His presence and his voice are clear, calm, disarming. "I mean when I say/ You're beautiful," he sings tenderly on "lgoyh", and there is a glowing sincerity in his voice. For a soft-spoken 24-year-old, he carries himself with remarkable confidence, which radiates through his music with a kind of healing quality.
His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: Sound layers are introduced like deal clinchers in a slow seduction. Kwes began as a producer of other people's music (Speech Debelle, Micachu) before he decided to become the focus of his own productions, and Meantime breathes quietly with his attention to detail. Beneath a serene surface, all four songs bubble intricately. Listening to it in headphones lets you appreciate Kwes' understanding of spacing in the mix, the comforting swirl of these songs.
To comfort seems to be one of Kwes's main goals as a songwriter. On "Bashful", he's meeting the gaze of an older woman head-on and telling her, "I know I may be young to you, but I want to prove/ You may think what I say isn't true." On "lgoyh", he croons, this time to a seemingly younger woman, "Don't waste too many tears/ On those energies/ You have too many years ahead of you/ And not too many before you." He's capable of more than just sweet nothings too: the surreal "Honey", the only other full song, appears to be sung from the perspective of a head of cabbage longing for the jar of honey a shelf above it (as Ryan Dombal noted in his interview with Kwes).
Meantime has only four tracks, and one of them is a two-minute sound collage. When Kwes releases more music, he's going to make a formidable impression. He's a startlingly clear voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat.
