Album Review - “A Little Vengeance” by Jessie Reyez
Jessie Reyez is such a fascinating entity in the R&B space. Her voice, if nothing else, is the poster child of cursive singing, and her subject matter often centers around various roles of love. It’s the prototypical nucleus of modern R&B, yet Jessie routinely finds a way to make the formula enjoyable, replayable, and most importantly, relatable.
Jessie Reyez has the natural energy of a best friend. One who will willingly tell you all of her problems with the anticipation of you interjecting your own opinion, while mutually sharing your troubles, resulting in an hour-long trauma-bonding session. It’s endearing without approaching exhausting territory. On her album A Little Vengeance, this energy takes center stage and feels less like a plot to get vengeance, but more in line with Jessie Reyez stating, “Can you believe this shit?” Before launching into a lengthy diatribe about love, careers, or wronged friends. It’s the ultimate symbol that friendship and trust are strong.
Musically, this project is 14 songs with three interludes, and for the most part, Jessie does not waste a moment of musical integrity. Poised with one of the best voices in music, topics that she elected to speak on often stand out because they have an open-air realness to them, as if she wrote her verse immediately as the situation she experienced concluded. While most R&B songs feel as though they were designed with music in mind, each song on A Little Vengeance feels as though they were her poems, and she decided to include musical elements later.
Production on the project is par the course for Jessie, as her ear for instrumentals have always remained the gold-standard for modern R&B. Tracks like the RAAHiim assisted “Love & Money Don’t Go” capture the subtle synths and muted muted thumping drums or the post-weary driven guitar strums on “Everybody Cries Sometimes” ventures the beautiful shifts the album is capable of making without taking the listener out of the moment. Jessie has always been a brilliant conductor of these small details of album mastery. By the end, you will find yourself appreciating the smooth transitions that help make the album pass by without enduring listener fatigue.
With a few quick interludes that help guide the story of how Jessie crafts her vengeance, this album is incredibly enjoyable and should be heard by everyone looking to get their R&B fix.
