For what is ostensibly club music, Loraine James’ productions can feel fiercely guarded. Many dancers and DJs favor smoothly paved superhighways to bliss; James’ zig-zagging tracks are filled with potholes, speed bumps, and the occasional vertiginous bridge to nowhere. The London musician likes her beats jagged and her melodies slippery, and there’s an abrasiveness to her work—club bangers and sofa chillers alike—that seems to warn: Don’t get too comfortable.
But about halfway through Reflection, her third album, James breaks the fourth wall and makes an unexpected overture to her doubters. “I know you may not like this one/But it’s just fun, you know, it’s just fun,” she murmurs, as music-box chimes and video-game chirps tussle over erratic kicks and snares. “I know you might not like this one/So press the skip button.” As the song lumbers on, drawing us deeper into its murky swirl of 8-bit bleeps and percussive shards, she shifts her address from the incurious streamer to the frustrated punter. “Hate the music that I’m playing/That is why you’re not staying/That is why there’s no dancing,” she intones, actually singing now, with surprising gentleness. “You are in a hurry/Leaving the club early.” It’s hurt, accusatory, and apprehensive all at once. And despite the brooding beat, it’s also slyly funny, underscoring the irreverence that runs through her subversive approach.
James has often insisted that she makes not just club or bass music, but experimental music, full stop. “Self Doubt (Leaving the Club Early)” is a good reminder that she’s right. Like the entirety of Reflection, the song demonstrates a degree of risk-taking that’s all too rare in dance-adjacent music. James’ work often explores the tension between club music and listening music, and between community and solitude. “I’m a shy person,” she has said; “I just like playing a dark, smoky room, not giving a shit what people think.” Reflection neatly encapsulates both sides of that seeming contradiction: It is both as restive as her music has ever been and as reflective as its title suggests. It tests the boundaries of dance music not for the mere sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge.
James’ beats are as tough as ever on Reflection. Hi-hats explode in rat-a-tat bursts. Staggering kick drums bounce like a boxer against the ropes. Blasts of sub-bass threaten to topple anything in their path. But where drum’n’bass wields powerful sounds in the interest of steely efficiency, there’s something cavalier about James’ grooves, as though they could happily fall apart at any moment. That refusal to satisfy expectations is a big part of what’s so compelling about them.
Lyrically, the album’s ruminative tone is far from the beats’ scrappy, devil-may-care attitude. Like last fall’s Nothing EP, much of the record is spent collaborating with guest vocalists, and despite their considerable range, virtually all of them focus on questions of identity and purpose. The opening “Built to Last” runs Zürich singer’s Xzavier Stone’s determined couplets—“Mountain top, what I aim for/Work hard til that day come”—through thick vocal processing, rendering self-actualization with the consistency of buckwheat honey. In “Black Ting,” London drill artist Le3 bLACK raps in soft-spoken triplets over a cat-footed beat, juggling knotty rhymes with the occasional declarative statement: “There’s a lot on the line/We must prove this.” Nova matches the floating synths of “Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery” with free-associative verses that build to an unexpected climax, juxtaposing a Thelma & Louise-inspired cliff jump with Drexciyan Afro-futurism. The Baths collaboration “On the Lake Outside” feels at once like a stylistic outlier and the album’s thematic heart. Draping languid synthesizers over a beat like a stick being dragged across a metal fence, James fractures Baths’ voice into multi-part harmonies as he sets the scene in boldly imagistic terms: a lake, a rowboat, the sky reflected in water. Then he cuts to the chase: “I was always a little off/But I get up and get on.” It’s an elegant way to frame Reflection’s abiding interest in struggle and perseverance.
The album’s best and most revealing tracks are those where James herself takes the mic, though she’s careful never to give away too much. In “Simple Stuff,” she ponders a private question, muttering along to a deconstructed UK garage groove: “I like the simple stuff/You like the simple things/What does that bring?” Is she talking about a relationship? The vagaries of taste? The cryptic lines fit the trickiness of her beatmaking, whose odd angles suggest impossible spaces where normal laws of physics do not apply. In “Change,” the album’s longest track, she pursues a similarly interior line of inquiry. “What are you gonna do about it? Huh? What? What are you gonna do about it?” she asks, her voice pitched high and childlike in the fashion of the Knife or Fever Ray, giving her interior monologue an otherworldly presence.
James is most direct on “Reflection,” essentially a spoken-word piece set to ambient bells and syn-flutes. “Haven’t seen family or friends/From Rugby to Essex,” she muses, almost whispering. “Feels like the walls are closing in.” Written, presumably, in the depths of lockdown, it’s a meditation on isolation that will resonate with many who lived through the claustrophobic doldrums of 2020. “Everything will be fine, I think,” she says; then she changes her mind: “Feel like my head will explode.” Despite the song’s relatability, there’s a sense that we’re eavesdropping on private thoughts. James comes right out and says as much: “This is a reflection/Just mine not yours.” It’s a moment of intimacy that, in turn, engenders a powerful feeling of trust. Her music may sound as guarded as ever. But on Reflection, Loraine James has invited us in.
Buy: Rough Trade
(popitrecords.com.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.