Dawn Richard: too good to ignore

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/feb/13/dawn-richard-too-good-to-ignore

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After a week in which the biggest music story was an awards show proving itself, yet again, to be backwards and meaningless, you wouldn’t think that 2015 is shaping up to be one of the most exciting years for new music in recent memory. Not that the artists responsible have a hope of getting anywhere near as close to a Grammy as Beyoncé , but Levon Vincent’s raw house, Rae Sremmurd’s youthful rap exuberance and Jazmine Sullivan’s smoky modern day blues are helpful reminders that it’s worth extending the conversation beyond the same five megastar names.

The most ambitious and revelatory album of the year might be the lowest-profile, despite (or perhaps because of) its creator’s mainstream connections. Dawn Richard’s Blackheart is a wild ride through the kind of constantly shapeshifting electronics that make everyone else’s so-called “innovation” sound timid – and the emotional peaks and troughs give a sense of purpose to her experimentation. It starts with a piercing acapella cry – “I thought I lost it all” – and its twists and turns thereafter take in Greek mythology and feminist retellings of the Billie Jean groupie archetype, as Richard tells a tale of failure, loss and ultimate triumph.

Co-produced by Richard and the relative unknown Noisecastle III, Blackheart sounds like little else. There are brief reminders of Björk’s Medúlla in the amphibious vocal layering of Titans, Moby’s Go in the frantic rhythms of Calypso or Aaliyah’s What If in Adderall/Sold’s lurch into rock, but they are only the barest hints.

Otherwise, from the grand gestures to the tiniest, engrossing details, Blackheart is packed with original ideas. A pastoral guitar chimes just as the heaviest bass on the record drops on Billie Jean, as if the song is simultaneously taking place in a hip-hop video and a folksy coffee shop. Richard duets with herself repeatedly, her clear head voice setting off a version of herself digitally treated beyond recognition. Odd burrs and clicks decorate Richard’s elegiac vocal line in Projection before the song makes a left turn towards a fluttering woodwind outro. The epic seven-minute centrepiece Adderall/Sold spins on its own axis at least twice, culminating in an urgent electro stomp – “Get thee right, get, get thee right” intones Richard; the sudden drop into the album’s lullabic heart, Swim Free, leaves you gasping for breath.

Blackheart makes your head spin and heart pound in equal measure. So why is it being largely ignored? Critics tend to be enamoured of the idea of independent artists, but usually this simply translates as championing artists who emerge through the boutique indie industry. Richard, however, is genuinely independent. As a solo artist, she has self-released a mixtape (2011’s A Tell Tale Heart), an album-length EP (2012’s Armor On) and two instalments of a proposed three-album trilogy (2013’s Goldenheart preceded Blackheart); her team has never numbered more than five and currently amounts to two.

Richard is keen to emphasise the benefits being without a label or PR confers on her: the freedom to commit fully to her artistic vision. In this context – as well as the wider one, in which it is harder than ever to break through as a black female R&B artist – her success in maintaining a cult fan base and scoring No 1s on the electronic chart is impressive. As she put it in an interview with Fact magazine: “Being a black woman in this industry ... able to have a No 1 album with no label, no one to push us, and have some of the world’s hardest critics praise us? That to me is … a feminist act. I believe I am standing firm as a black woman in this industry in a time that it is hard as an artist period.”

But if Richard had the marketing of FKA Twigs – another talented artist blending touches of R&B with innovative electronic production – is there any doubt that “cult fan base” would be translated into “critical darling”? There’s certainly a suspicion that Richard’s history has prejudiced writers overly concerned with notions of “cool”. Whereas Twigs was introduced to the world as a fully-formed artist, Richard’s mid-00s emergence as one-fifth of Danity Kane, the Diddy-assembled reality TV girl group, does not lend itself to such an easy narrative. Subsequently, Diddy – a man with a keen eye for genuine talent – retained Richard as a singer and songwriter in his Diddy – Dirty Money trio. In a double injustice, neither the epic ambition of Diddy – Dirty Money’s music nor Richard’s role within a group generally dismissed, in another example of everyday sexism, as “Diddy plus backup singers”, were fully recognised.

In a pantomime reprisal of his infamous 2009 interruption of Taylor Swift, Kanye West accused the Grammys of “diminishing art” and being “disrespectful to inspiration” by not rewarding a woman who, frankly, is much bigger than the Grammys. West was technically correct about Beyoncé’s substantial merits vis-à-vis Beck, but what diminishes art and disrespects inspiration much more is a media landscape in which those comments dominate the news cycle at the expense of artists making genuinely exciting new music.