Sun Without the Heat

Album review

For the title track of her fifth solo album, cellist and singer-songwriter Leyla McCalla called upon a Frederick Douglass speech, circa 1857, to a crowd of mostly white abolitionists. "You want the crops without the plow/ You want the rain without the thunder/ You want the ocean without the roar of its waters," she paraphrases his words. McCalla's take sounds gentle, like a tropical breeze, her voice a soothing balm as she reinforces Douglass' message: There is no progress nor liberation without putting in the work. She adds her own line, "Can't have the sun without the heat," which feels like a particularly apt metaphor as our world heats up around us both literally and figuratively. McCalla—who has been a member of Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters, both with Rhiannon Giddens—was also inspired by Afrofuturist writers Octavia Butler and Alexis Pauline Gumbs to write songs not just encouraging commitment but hope. Her lilt is songbird sweet on "Scaled to Survive" as she borrows from Gumbs' book Undrowned, which looks to marine mammals for lessons on survival. "Thank you for laughing me into this portal," McCalla quotes via song, spinning a tribute to her own Haitian-born mother. "How do you let yourself feel all the pain? … You brought me here/ The world on its side/ Gave me a love scaled to survivе." Haiti's history and music were the focus of McCalla's last album, the terrific Breaking the Thermometer, and this time she expands her embrace to an Afro-diaspora that spans the globe. "Tree" celebrates a Tropicálismo samba before crashing into fuzzed-out noise. "So I'll Go" is sultry blues. "Love We Had" is a bright, high-spirited and Tropicália-inflected cover of a song by Ethiopian composer Ali Mohammed Birra, an Oromo icon. McCalla has said that the New Orleans session for Sun Without the Heat is the first time she's gone into the studio without a framework in place, explaining, "we built the frame in real time." You can hear a new looseness in her work, seemingly egged on by producer Maryam Qudus—who creates psyched-out indie rock as Spacemoth and as the keyboardist for La Luz. There's a sense of freedom and confidence in "Tower," which starts out tentative, then bursts into a flamenco-esque strut loaded with drum rolls, sultry hip-swish rhythm and the psychedelic-swirl of surf guitar. On "Open the Road," McCalla's voice travels a languid path, never rushed, even as the music bounces and bumps and skitters. "Take Me Away" hypnotizes with McCalla's title chant and Nahum Zdybel's snaking guitar. The band shifts gears for the lovely, traditional piano ballad "I Want to Believe"—McCalla applying hopeful vocals right over the melancholy chords and Eeyore strings. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz