- Ghostly ambient R&B and experimental soundscapes from an exciting new voice on Kranky.
- Niecy Blues's Exit Simulation begins like a lullaby. A stately bass guitar figure opens "1111" and gives way to their voice, echoing into the distance. Their breathy vocals double, harmonize and then splinter, cascading through the stereo field before coalescing around a blurry synthesizer drone. Once a pulsing sequence appears, the effect is like lighting a candle in an enormous dark room. As the flame flickers, you can start to make out the contours enough to feel the space yawning around you. It's enormous and sublime yet warm and inviting, gently commanding every bit of your attention.
The Charleston, South Carolina, artist, born Janise Robinson, grew up in a deeply religious household in rural Oklahoma. As they put it, their first experience with ambient music was in the church, captivated by the echoing guitar lines that rippled through molasses-slow songs of worship. They left Oklahoma for South Carolina and studied musical theatre at Anderson University, a small Christian college nestled in the state's hilly northwest corner. Exit Simulation, Robinson's stunning ambient-leaning debut, deftly uses restraint and builds tension to swirl its minimal elements into a rapturous whole.
The songs on Exit Simulation are most easily classifiable as R&B-adjacent, but the music regularly stretches into more far-flung territory. The lumbering drum patterns and sensuous basslines of "U Care" and "Violently Rooted" lean towards trip-hop, especially when the arrangements gather themselves into a whirling derecho. Mary Lattimore lends her celestial harp to the billowing "Exits," and "Soma" recruits a full band for its circular, psychedelic jazz arrangement. On "The Architect," Robinson piles layer after layer of their vocals over a jittery drum machine loop and a Casio-like drone that never quite resolves, heightening a sense of anxiety as the song crescendos. It feels like co-producer T. Morris Wilson took the footwork blueprint of Janet Jackson's brilliant The Velvet Rope deep cut "Empty," smashed it against a wall, and pieced the shards back together in a new shape.
Robinson's gorgeous voice is the centrepiece of these compositions and the true source of the record's power. They display an impressive vocal range through the kinds of melodic embellishments usually associated with contemporary R&B, but these songs' choral quality are more indebted to the devotional music they grew up with. Robinson bathes their voice in cathedral-like reverb and stacks it into complex, skyward harmonies while mining it for new textures. They submerge it beneath a murky low-pass filter on "Messages From Above," while the title track weaves billowing vocal runs and dry, close-miked lyrical passages into an undulating mass. On "Cascade," Robinson uses a looped phrase ("If you surrender to the air, you can ride it") to construct the instrumental bed, pitch shifting it to create a yearning chord progression.
Despite the record's experimental, genre-hopping nature, Exit Simulation is immediate and immersive. "Analysis Paralysis," the album's poppiest and best song, sways languidly like Spanish moss in a slight breeze. A small synth accent note sits within a dubby beat and Robinson, voice double-tracked in beautiful harmony, ruminates on a question. The words, "I don't need a response / I don't need an answer / Want to sit in this analysis paralysis," gurgle in the back of the mix like the low simmer of a thought you can't quite banish. During the chorus, their voice thunders to the forefront, surging through clouds of tape delay. The song melts into a piano ballad in its final minute, and what sounds like thousands of copies of Robinson's voice bloom and quickly fade. It's a breathtaking moment in an album full of them. Exit Simulation is a spellbinding experience, an invitation to travel into spaces you didn't know existed and let them change you.
Tracklist01. 1111
02. The Nite B4
03. U Care
04. Violently Rooted
05. Exit Simulation
06. Exits
07. Soma
08. Messages From Above
09. Lament
10. Violently Rooted Reprise
11. The Architect
12. Analysis Paralysis
13. Cascade