Kali Uchis isn’t the first singer to place sensual pleasure at the top of her priorities, but in an era when contemporaries like Kehlani and SZA complement the body talk with self-scrutiny, Uchis’ one-track mind feels as fresh and necessary as a cold beer after a walking tour. Using a high raspy flutter to project sex-drunk bliss, the Colombian American singer-songwriter hits a peak on Sincerely, her fifth album of candy-colored reveries and gossamer love-me-downs. At the midpoint between Diana Ross reveling in a love hangover and Aaliyah rocking the boat, Uchis’ music offers the equivalent of extended foreplay.
Sincerely is also, I must say, monotonous, like other people’s happiness can be. “Yeah, there’s angels watching over me,” she sings late in the album, and well, good for her—we all need comfort in dark times. On last year’s Orquideas, co-produced by a formidable brigade of Latin talent that included El Guincho alongside Geeneus and longtime Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sounwave, Uchis sang more or less the same kinds of songs in her patented husk-sigh but in Spanish, her second such full-length album; this difference made the difference. Singing in her first language released more nuances of expression than even the excellent Red Moon in Venus and Isolation knew how to spotlight. It had tonal variety to its love songs—call it Songs for Lovers Who Swing. On Sincerely, though, Uchis delivers a 45-minute monologue without so much as a look out the window for distraction.
A glance at the tracklist confirms her mood. She’s upbeat! With an exclamation mark! On “Sugar! Honey! Love!,” Uchis pushes her voice to ceiling-scraping heights over strings playing a faintly Indian melody to celebrate the kind of experience that can only happen to people like her: “And I did all my time/For a crime that wasn’t mine and made it out alive.” On the Miracles-indebted chug of “Daggers!” this openly bisexual artist nods towards the love that dare not speak its name; she and her angel babe “sweet as cherry pie” will make them turn their heads everywhere they go, like the would-be couple in the Ronettes’ queer-coded “Be My Baby.” Josh Crocker, who co-produced 2023’s “I Wish You Roses,” is back with “Lose My Cool,” a five-minute refutation of its title, for Uchis’ talent is to keep her cool in moments of surrender.
Uchis’ producers serve their client without fail. Few instrumental embellishments distract from her vocals, alas, and when they come, like the prominently mixed bass guitar on “It’s Just Us,” they’re welcome. “ILYSMIH” demonstrates this team’s talent for using the studio as instrument—a bit of echo here, a keyboard ripple there—for the sake of a valentine to her baby with partner Don Tolliver last year; nothing can penetrate this gauze-covered cocoon of sound. Otherwise tracks like “Breeze!” don’t deserve the punctuation, and “All I Can Say” depends on some acquaintance with girl-group traditions.
Sincerely plays better as a whole rather than as tracks excerpted for a playlist, which is fine, though “Sugar! Honey! Love!” and “Daggers!” rank among Uchis’ most lived-in tracks. Besides, albums as guileless and hermetic as Sincerely, recorded by ambitious artists of relative youth, tend to look like a moment’s monument to a joy that they have no way of knowing is transient, and if it isn’t, well, that’s fine too. Kali Uchis will on future albums figure out a way to explain her bliss to the rest of us with the variation it deserves.
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