Yaya Bey
Do It Afraid
DRINK SUM WTR
Last year around this time, we looked in at independent Brooklyn-based nu-neo-soul vocalist and composer Yaya Bey and found her in a not-so-quieting heart space: at the axis of grieving her late father (local hip-hop icon Grand Daddy I.U.) while maintaining the daily grind of finding romance in all the (hopefully) right places on her then-new album Ten Fold. From her brawny, soulful voice and her emotive, energized lyrics, Bey was crestfallen and crying through her teeth, but ready for the next phase of her life, for love and melody to unfurl.
Closer in sound, vibe, and length in its 18 brief, blipping songs to a diverse groove mixtape than an actual cohesive artist album, there’s an old-school rap, acid jazz, soca, and trip-dub feel to Do It Afraid songs such as, respectively, “Cindy Rella,” “Blicky,” “Merlot and Grigio,” and “Spin Cycle.” With that mix and all of its rich production flips, Bey automatically sounds as if she’s ready for a crystal-sparkling ball. When it comes to navigating her way though her love affairs’ future, Bey the singer is a wellspring of passion as she roots herself in lower, limber, temporal tones during the cascading synth-shuffle “End of the World” and its refrain: “Hold me in your arms tonight / Act like it’s the last night of your life.”
She keeps those low-moaning tones, her intent toward sensualizing, and the rolling synthesizer sounds for the spoken-sang “A Surrender,” and manages to make the balladry of her midnight-hour jazz moment “Breakthrough” into a breathy, rapturous scat-rap attack. If you could imagine Anita Baker as the Ross third of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and add in MC Lyte—boom, it’s breakthrough time. But before you guess that Bey is happily lost in the old school, in comes “Dream Girl,” which sounds spacey, contemporary, and spare in the way that her overly complex note and chord structures don’t.
Is this a portent of where Yaya Bey—the producer-musician, not so much the lovelorn singer and lyricist—is going next? If anything, staying tuned is always worth the ride.
