The digital era has fed the desire for slick, minimalist apps and beautiful, easily applied filters that try to make functional objects feel like art. Washed out colors and stripped-down fonts (or, in music, lightly distorted guitars and reverb-tinged vocals) offer a sort of distressed beauty that suggests depth and implies seriousness. Art, these images and sounds suggest, may be hard to define, but you know it when you reblog it.
LA.-based singer Nylo supported herself for a while as a graphic designer and session musician, so she has a feel for cool, crafted product. She released a debut EP last year in what has become an archetypal model for hip R&B acts, dropping a fully-formed project with almost no supporting information other than a monochromatic cover. That collection, Memories Speak, landed perfectly on trend, mimicking the careening production and lacerating self-doubt of the Weeknd and echoing the smooth pop vocal confidence of Keri Hilson or Ciara. Nylo was doing the right things to suggest she had a vision worth paying attention to, and attention quickly followed. Mac Miller and Nas tweeted excited endorsements, and Nylo landed a major label deal with Epic.
The follow-up mixtape, Indigo Summer, continues in the same vein, hinting at meaning through abstraction. Nylo’s phenomenal voice and savvy ear for production are still front and center, but the record shows its hand a little more. While Memories Speak suggested an artist with strong pop instincts, Indigo Summer often seems more like the work of someone with substantial musical talent and an eye for aesthetic details who doesn't have much to say. Nylo is drawn to signifiers -- Audrey Hepburn, the movie Donnie Darko -- that are such familiar tropes of cool that they have been smoothed out to near meaninglessness. Her musical approach is also surface-level, approximating the airy formlessness of neo soul in a secondhand way, leading to wispy R&B that sounds pretty but feels indecisive. A joyless cover of Robin Thicke’s summer smash “Blurred Lines” demonstrates the shortcomings of this style most clearly, abandoning the original’s crisp, carefree funk in favor of tepid, drawn-out vocal meandering and a contrived, theatrical tension.
While Nylo may be very much part of a trend rather than dictating it, she still is delivering more realized music than many of her blog-friendly peers due to both her airy voice and an instinct for hooks. Smoldering first single “Fool Me Once” ambitiously layers in chiming synthesizers and a propulsive drumbeat, but its most sublime moments are the simple “woo-oo-oos” that highlight her vocal clarity. The similarly regretful “Take It Back” concludes with elaborate backing vocal flourishes over a martial drumbeat as the Destiny’s Child-like chorus ostensibly remains the focus of the song. Then there's “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, which flips its movie-title conceit into a rather wonderful image of lost-love obsession, as Nylo reaches a pinnacle of vocal potential on the straining chorus of “lately I’ve been thinking about you.” It’s deeply satisfying to hear her hit these high notes, which constitute the album’s purest moment of emotion.
Nylo’s at her most effective when she trusts her emotional ideas instead of leaning on concept, a point driven home by the lackluster collaborations with the album’s two big producer names, Tricky Stewart and Fisticuffs. The latter's “Cocaine Hearts” delivers its warning about addiction by making living fast and dying young sound grating and incredibly boring. At these moments, Indigo Summer’s on-the-nose approach exposes its lack of substance and distracts from the way in which it’s best enjoyed: as an aesthetically pleasing feat of design, the work of a talented person with good taste still figuring out how to translate those things into something more.
