“Not another love song,” Ella Mai sighed on her comeback single of that title. She clearly wasn’t listening to herself. Like the British R&B star’s eponymous debut, Heart on My Sleeve is packed with love songs. Slow love songs, mid-paced love songs, some even slower love songs. No matter. While there’s nothing as obviously stellar as Grammy-winning US Top 5 hit Boo’d Up or its even better sequel, Trip, Ella has always had a gift for parsing the everyday dramas of twentysomething relationships in relatable (and sometimes 18-rated) language.
While her first album was happiest in its nostalgic 90s groove, there’s greater ambition now. Fallen Angel is magically odd, like Beyoncé headlining Kanye’s Sunday Service, built on a tricksy, rattling rhythm suffused with eerie choral harmonies, corralled by a wayward preacher. Pieces and Trying also confidently future-proof Mai’s sound, although some may find the production too stridently digital. Maybe there could be more London grit amid the generic American gloss, which lets unwieldy basketball terms such as “full-court press” loose in otherwise blameless love songs. Still, given how feeble the British music industry is at nurturing R&B talent, we should probably give her a pass.
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