Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and what better way to celebrate you and your lover than with a bed-shaking, hip-rocking, love-making song. Baltimore artist Gidi rocks your body in all the right places with his 2023 song “BODYCRY”.
Riding a beat that is influenced by Timbaland from the bass to the keys, Gidi switches from singing to rapping as he smoothly scales across the melody. Bringing the sound all together, creating a bedroom anthem that doubles as a dancefloor hit, Gidi brings both words together, making you and your partner feel like you are the only ones who matter in that moment.
While keeping the intimacy high, Gidi throws in lyrics like “Cuttin’ up, playin’ Lor Scoota hits,” “I’m hittin’ it like God bless her, I’m in this bitch like Bmore aye,” “Fuck is you geekin’ for Gidi,” as a tribute to his hometown Baltimore, never forgetting his roots.
“BODYCRY” is a smoldering song to set the mood for a passionate moment between you and your partner this February 14. This song makes you want to bring candles, flowers, and the burning love between you and that special someone. “BODYCRY” is available on Soundcloud and streaming on all major platforms. (Chinarose Riley)
Amber August is a Baltimore-based artist who capitalizes on ’80s pop and modern R&B to create her first EP, “Bittersweet.” Her sweet vocals combined with her bitter messages create an album like nothing I’ve ever heard before, with a unique tension between the lyrics and the music. Her musical motifs are smooth as butter as she digs into the ups and downs of dating.
Amber August’s music is a bass-lover’s dream. The bass blends well with the lead chords complimenting her voice. The title track toys with major and minor chord progressions to truly convey a bittersweet message. Those who are fans of 2020s R&B will vibe to this album.
Her lyrics are versatile and take a spin on classic songs of other genres. “Jenna” starts out with a nod to Dolly Parton’s famous hit “Jolene”: “You know what’s worse than a Jolene? / A fucking Jenna.” She is bold in the message she wants you to hear, especially in “Origami,” where she talks about all she sacrificed for naught in the end.
The EP was released last November and is available for streaming on Soundcloud. (Camille Duncan)
KiaB — “Soft Girl Gangsta Era”
In the last issue, I talked about being put onto rap embryonic virtuoso KiaB. Her new EP, released at the top of the year, is most appropriate for this season of Love & Sex. In 5 tracks of provocatively seasoned bars she uses lessons of heartbreak as key ingredients to cook with.
Right out the gate on “Where is KB?” she confidently lays out exactly where she’s been. “Just give it time hold on a sec / I hear they lookin’ for KB / I was in the house I had a man and had another seed / Now I got two kids, two pretty girls, they both look just like me / I calmed down a lot and switched the plot I know they watchin me.”
And it just gets better from there. With no hook, just raw Baltimore hood energy and owning sexual assertion, she shoots darts at an unqualified male partner:
“You the type to run your mouth and now your homeboy wanna taste it / and I’m the type to let him taste it / I’m the type to fuck him crazy / I’m the type to say nut in me / and then ah go and kill the baby.”
The EP is full of sexual freedom, empowerment, and female dominance. KiaB touches on so much, from narcissistic exes who can’t take no for an answer on “Aint Sweet” to the necessary mixtape fashioned “We Want!” sliding over the classic Lil Boosie “Wipe Me Down” beat. Closing out on “Outta Space,” with CHY Migo as the record’s only feature, the replay value is high on this project.
A very solid offering, we’re definitely tuned in to see what KiaB brings to the game this year and beyond.
“Soft Girl Gangsta Era” is streaming on all platforms. (Eze Jackson)
Bmore Lovechild — “Family Tides”
If we’re talking about love and sex, it gets no realer than this seven-song project. “Family Tides” is an extremely well-written opus documenting the life of a young father and how he sees himself in the world. Rapper/producer Bmore Lovechild, aka Paul Bridgeford, is the son of Baltimore Peace Movement’s Erricka Bridgeford. He opens the EP with “Letter To My Dad,” a heartfelt rundown of his complicated relationship with his father, a former Dip Set rapper from Baltimore named NOE who gained fame in the early 2000s for having a flow strikingly similar to Jay Z’s. Bridgeford uses these reflections on a strained relationship he has grown to understand to address his own realities as a new father.
“You the one thing in my life I can’t get over / You the mountain on the boulder / You the chip that’s on my shoulder/ he foundation of my rhymescape / You the breath that gave me life that’s why my mind great,” he raps.
In “Hearthbeat,” he speaks to his own newborn with lessons learned and commitment to give his child a better father than the one he had.
On the third track “10000 Hours,” he speaks of his love for his craft and the pursuit of success as a musician. “I’m well over 10,000 hours / I give another to double the power,“ he sings on the hook.
“‘Heaven’ was inspired after I mourned my inner child around Christmas 2024,” Bmore Lovechild told me via Instagram message. “It’s a letter to him. Just to let him know how far we’ve come and everything is okay. It felt important to speak with him before I stepped into a new chapter. Not to leave him behind but to wrap him in love and let him know that he will be nurtured now more than ever.”
From childhood to fatherhood to falling in love on “She Loves Me” and saluting the ancestors with “The Other Side,” the 22-minute EP explores love in its realest forms through top-tier writing, descriptive storytelling, and impressively masterful wordplay.
On “Bmore Love,” the final track and an ode to Baltimore, he delivers one of the most poignant lines on the project: “Like what is a rapture if the powerful pastors take a break from they passion just to fall to the madness / Like wont it be tragic if the ones with the magic sitting idly by because the world is traumatic / That’s the joke and we gas it.”
When I asked what he wanted the listener to walk away with, he told me “On ‘Bmore Love’ I want the listener to walk away feeling that there’s always a reason to simply choose love. In a city like this, even a world like this, it’s very easy to fall into despair.”
On my fifth listen, my own thoughts of choosing love had been confirmed. A very well put together project necessary for these times.
Family Tides is streaming on Spotify and all other major platforms. (Eze Jackson)
The Soft Pink Truth — “Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever”
The Soft Pink Truth’s Drew Daniel probably isn’t looking for another job. As a Hopkins English professor, the author of several books (the spectacularly titled “Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature” being the most recent), and one half of the seemingly jet-setting electronic duo Matmos, Daniel has plenty on his plate. But, “Can Such Delightful Times Go on Forever?” the new album from his “solo” project The Soft Pink Truth, will certainly have Hollywood calling in search of film scores (as they likely already have been doing for a while), and will probably bring the conservatory types knocking at his door as well.
I put the word solo in scare quotes above because more than 20 musicians contribute to this orchestral record, playing flutes, trumpets, bassoons, french horns, oboes, violins, violas, cellos, harps, saxophones, bird calls, and more to create a gorgeous and lush soundscape that is both avant garde and accessible, somehow simultaneously 19th century Romance and 22nd century futurism. Daniel is now, clearly, a composer. And a good one.
“Such Delightful Times” is a challenging record to write about because every time you think it is one thing, it breaks and becomes something else, but organically. In that way, it’s a really psychedelic album — not that it is necessarily “trippy” but that its movements roll in waves like a mushroom trip.
In the opening track, “Mere Survival Is Not Enough,” there is a faint swell of sound out of which emerges a melody that sounds almost like Nick Cave’s “Albuquerque” or Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips, but before you can even finish that thought, that melodic line is subsumed by a bouncy beat that straddles the line between dance and chamber trance. Then, when the layers reunite or synthesize, the lush melody is deeper and more exultant.
“Phrygian Ganymede” feels at moments like Phillip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach,” but in a way that just slyly glances at the best parts of that composition, largely because this whole album, as crammed full of ideas as it is, comes in just under 40 minutes with eight tracks. And, despite the fact that Ganymede was a male lover of Zeus, with the swelling strings and strange time-shifts, this music is more about romance than it is about sex, but it is deeply sensual.
“Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?” is a big departure from previous Soft Pink Truth albums, and some of the change is political, as Daniel explained in an essay on the conundrum of making art under fascism in the music site the Quietus. On the one hand, Daniel has made protest songs with covers of crust punk songs sampling Trump’s voice and fuck-Trump chants and, on the other, made joyous, disco-inflected dance music. “But watching Trump shimmy to ‘Y.M.C.A.’ at Mar-a-Lago, exulting in his nostalgic longings for a past of white entitlement, watching the seamless consumption of disco by the worst and most blatant avatar of racist politics, something curdled and died inside me. I didn’t feel that I could stomach making dance music in the face of this,” he writes, careful not to blame the Black and brown originators of disco for its abuse by fascists, but simply unable to move forward in that direction.
Whatever it is each of us do, a lot of us must be engaging with these same questions about how do we keep doing it under fascism, and I hope that we can find a solution as gorgeous and yet still engaged as “Such Delightful Times.”
“Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?” is available on major streaming services and on vinyl, cd, and streaming via Bandcamp from Thrill Jockey Records. (Baynard Woods)