Album Review: Alchemy by Davion Farris
The eldest of Inglewood’s Farris brothers devoted years to writing songs for other singers to take home. On thirteen songs of grown two-voice R&B, he kept the best ones for himself.
The Gouché-Farris household in Inglewood lived by music the same way other households live by their family trade. Jackie Gouché-Farris, a seasoned backup singer and minister of music, raised her children in the midst of it, and two of her sons, SiR and D Smoke, make albums under their own names while their eldest son remains behind the glass. Davion Farris went the songwriter route instead, years and years of session work culminating in a Grammy Award for co-writing “Falling in Love” by Lucky Daye and signing a record deal with Lena Waithe’s imprint Hillman Grad via Def Jam. Alchemy is him finally taking center stage and singing the material he chose to keep.
Kenyon Dixon says he will love a woman until she falls asleep on “Flirting in the Hallway,” and Farris replies from the window seat, laid back with the indo lit, watching her put on a striptease and telling her she needs to take her to apartment 16B, Marcus Paul’s horns and Edi Callier’s guitar providing a live band behind his come-on. The two men say the same thing to her: “If I let this go, you can’t tell nobody.” Jai’Len Josey starts “Feel” with the temperature rising and ice running down her spine, and Farris meets her halfway into the track with a guitar solo taking the bridge. Iman Omari produced “All My Love” and sang its second half too, swearing to read her mind and make her dreams come true, while S!MONE returns “Love You Forever” with a verse about a woman who once could not see and now sees everything. Farris wrote both halves of those conversations, and each of the guests gets a full half of a real conversation.
The woman from “Fire” didn’t bother answering the favorite color question the first night they met, and she prefers staying home balancing her chakras to sitting through an opera. Farris praises her for everything she’s done to improve him: “She baptized me in fire/She made me bare my soul,” and later on, “She turned my lead to gold.” That chorus is the clearest he gets about what good love did to him.
A ride share drops off in the rain, the passenger gives his umbrella to a stranger, and she introduces herself as Mary. “Something About Mary” runs for 28 seconds and leads into “L.A. Mary,” five minutes of a dancer who paints like Mona Lisa and who makes more money stripping on camera than anything else, wearing diamonds from a little man whom Farris stops covering up in mid-sentence: “They no longer call him pimp/That’s really what he is.” By the second verse, she’s calling customers names to make a little extra, killing her days with Adderall, and keeping quiet from the family who wants to see her win. Ant Bell produced it patiently and without hurrying, filling it with guitar and horn solos by Noah Ehler and Marcus Paul respectively, and Farris sings her refrain: “Peace of mind is so hard to find/All she does is cry.” That track is the finest lyricism Farris has written under his own name.
There is no such thing as a casual encounter in “Fiendin’.” Farris insists he was never trying to fuck, and that he told her he wanted to make love, but a few lines down he begs for a lie she can remember and suffers through withdrawals every time she is gone. The last verse yanks the pin out of the entire affair, Farris confessing “I can’t get caught fallin’ too deep/’Cause if I do then I won’t leave.” He works that same trope in the darker “Down Bad,” singing her as the drug and the plug, wondering why he cannot just sober up, offering his overdose as an escape plan if he fails. Ray Vaughn finds comedy in that addiction in the only rap verse of that song: “Since you blocked me, I can’t get over the counter like medicine.” He blames a voodoo doll, or whatever she gave him with his spaghetti, and the punchlines help him break away from verses Farris writes dead serious. Farris ends it sadder than either of them, conceding “A castle don’t hold up in sand,” and leaves the beach altogether.
He finds himself with the most space for writing in his slow jams on “Good Girl,” where Seige Monstracity gives him space for imagining the moonlight dripping over her skin tone and sending a half-past-midnight text asking her to come slide. The writing loses its strength in “On Your Mind,” however. Farris promises to spin the block if she steps into the whip, tells his ex that his bedroom walls need painting because of what they saw, and asks her to admit that he is still inside of her mind. Adrian Forbes and Joshua Coleman produced it cleanly and hovering, and the only memorable element of the track is Michael John Morgan’s live bass guitar. The pleading in it could belong to anyone.
Farris calls himself the victim and the suspect of the crime on “It’s Done,” accepts the blame for playing a dangerous game and despises the view from the skies of his lies. D.K. The Punisher produced this song and “Reality,” and they both feature a defeated calmness. Farris loses on “Reality,” saying, “I gave it all, all that I had, and it wasn’t enough.” His younger brother SiR takes the second verse of this song, still failing to believe that he won’t become someone she believes in, one last Hail Mary put in the air to check if anything remains there. Both of these guys reach the same concession, “After all, I still love you,” and neither of them moves to make a reunion happen. Farris wrote these two-voice songs to flirt; however, this one requires the help of his brother.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Fire,” “Down Bad,” “Reality”