Take Off from Mercy

Contour

Released on 11/1/24 by Mexican Summer
Main artists: Contour
Genre: R&B

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Khari Lucas, who performs under the name Contour, has shown a strong grasp on the idea of the blues as an emotional state that never really leaves, you no matter where your stylistic impulses take you. It's an intertwined reaction to both the outside forces that bear down on you and the desperate places that can take someone—a cycle of heavy melancholy, impulsive efforts to break out of it, and the guilt that hangs deep when those efforts only make things worse. Contour's Take Off From Mercy pulls much of its strength from the idea that it's part of a long, communicative tradition with Black existentialist art. Its songwriting directly invokes Toni Morrison (her novel Song of Solomon is a stated influence), Saul Williams (who writes and narrates his own poetic interludes), and Nina Simone (adopting the title of opening cut "If He Changed My Name" for its desperation-driven cry for hope). Its sound recalls both the vulnerable-yet-resilient tenor of Aaron Neville's voice and the delicate power of Terry Callier's soul-folk compositions, but the music that emerges from this is heightened by a push and pull between the directly confessional and the allusively abstract. The jazz-laced sample-flips of previous album Onwards! are sidestepped in favor of a heavy focus on acoustic guitar—Lucas's way of engaging with the long continuum of the blues. But the atmosphere, co-authored with Omari Jazz during a nomadic eight-city recording process, is still charged with ghostly deep-dub echoes and glitchy-yet-warm ambient electronics, pulsating with tension whether or not the drums accentuate the nervous energy (the bursts of drum and bass on "Gin Rummy"; the roiling samba of "(re)Turn") or recede into long stretches between near-silence and flickering tremors ("Ark of Bones"). When Mndsgn's synthesizers burble out from between the margins of the treated acoustic riffs of "The Earth Spins" and the meditative spiral of "Seasonal" meshes with an analog murmuring à la Boards of Canada, it's not so much a modernization of Contour's inherited sounds but an acknowledgement that even the hi-tech future eventually sounds like the hazy past. That helps give a generational weight to the journey Take Off from Mercy takes—one from a restless evening all the way through until the dawning clarity of morning, across a shifting landscape where the only constant is the restless mind of the person who keeps looking inwards in search of his lineage. His words haunt, even when they're evasively moody in their discontentment. And when he outlines details and names names, confronting stark futility in "Guitar Bains" ("The gun will never make us good/ I think I want it anyway") or yearning for the elusive connections that made him happy in "Theresa" ("Memory, shadow friend/ Light gonna change your shape/ Call me to trick once more/ I'd do it twice over"), they cut right to the bone. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz

Take Off from Mercy

Contour

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If He Changed My Name