Album Review: PEYOTE by Ambré
After years of writing love songs for Kehlani and serpentwithfeet, the New Orleans singer takes the lead voice back. PEYOTE is about desire, disgust, and repair, sequenced like a ceremony.
Peyote takes longer to grow than pretty much anything else in the desert, years before the cactus has even reached a size where it’s ready to harvest, and the rituals surrounding it take an entire night, starting with illness and getting clarity before dawn. Ambré knows a thing or two about the roundabout route. She grew up in New Orleans and worked as a songwriter for the likes of Kehlani and serpentwithfeet until she got a Grammy nomination as an uncredited songwriter for their records. PEYOTE is her first full-length project named after the cactus, and its visions don’t rise very high above the ground. They stay in hot-boxed cars, inherited curses, and a woman who refuses to come back.
The hardest-hitting beat of the lot belongs to “Until,” heavy 808s and airy synths by Justus West, and over that beat Ambré sings about a love that snuck up on her: “I wasn’t anticipating a real, a real love.” Her scenes are kept small and intimate, and “Parking Lot” is the smallest of them, a tighter beat by D.S. 16 and Super Miles, and thick bass making fast hits against soft keys, while she waits for somebody in a car, trying to figure out whom she can trust: “I been sipping/I been tripping too much/I see who I can trust.” Rain starts pouring, but she keeps playing the memory on repeat, of two people in the parking lot that have nowhere else to go. “Folklore,” which she co-produced with Austin Feinstein, is another interlude, a loop of chords circling one curse inherited by the singer, “Passed all the way down to me,” solved the New Orleans way, with a prayer at dawn. “Enter the Void” uses the same ingredients of a low humming synth and fragmented voices, a threshold kind of song.
The women of Ambré keep the upper hand, and none of them keeps it as much as the one from “She,” following her out of the room and then staying there. Over strong bass drops and dry drums making it difficult for her voice to sound, Ambré makes a promise, “Let her get whatever she wants/Just as long as she’s coming home,” and then accepts the fact that this woman will not come back. “Mona Lisa,” co-produced with Louie Lastic, brings some relief, fast melodies over a moving bassline, and her best pick-up line in this song is a history lesson, “Rock and roll came from the blues/Everything came from the blues.” She also measures the lover’s smile by the famous painting, and for once, Ambré reaches out for a cliché used up by everyone else.
“Bed Song” is less than a minute long and made of keys and light drum pulse, with Ambré taking possession of her side of a bed she doesn’t share anymore: “No one else could sleep on your side/It doesn’t feel right.” The slow burning of “The Art of Letting Go” gives the ache full arrangements, with rounded bass and restrained drums under two lovers that can’t stay together anymore, and she takes the release as a settled fact, “I understand the feeling of letting go,” a woman with an experience. There is a man’s voice at the end of the song too, asking her to call back, another caller she left behind. CARI meets her pain with pain in “Laugh Later, Cry Now,” tight layering of voices over dragging bass, with love described as “equally delicate and, oh, so crushing” and Ambré traveling back to her memories ruined by her lover.
The sympathy ends on “Go to Hell,” steady drums and vocals doubling in the background making her sing in the simplest way she ever did: “You wonder if I’m doing well/Ask me if I moved on, hell yeah/Honestly, you could go to hell.” The disgust is physical, the ick, the chills, and she takes part of the blame for herself: “I was love-blind, I shouldn’t have wasted my time.” Destin Conrad responds from the other side of the ending in “Destin’s Interlude,” his pitched-up voice floating over warm chords, saying it like it is, “I’m your temporary lover/And you’re mine for now.” He also asks about her new apartment and remembers her old plans of renovation.
serpentwithfeet, the singer whose records Ambré wrote, becomes devotional and weird in one verse of “Genesis3,” thick harmonies and little else behind him as he promises to “make a monument of broken glass and rewrite every superstition” and remembers times when there wasn’t enough money to make him laugh. Jay Versace adds the desert imagery over bass pulses, steady drums, and layered vocals on the song “PEYOTE,” when a woman admits to having her bad days in the open: “Sometimes you might see me cry/Crocodile tears of joy.” She is losing her mind, getting mixed up in time and reading someone else’s sunlight for hers, and the closest she gets to explaining it is with a shrug: “Even drugs can’t explain what we feel.”
She even hedges her recovery on “As Always / Feel,” a two-part suite by Justus West and Tane Runo, imagining a love that grows in her hands like a flower, and then taking it back for herself: “But I could be wrong/As always/Just doesn’t feel like always.” By the suite’s second thought, she decides that she doesn’t care where they go from here. “September” cuts deeper than anything else on this record, keys and slow sway under a woman who introduces herself as something other than a person: “I’m not a girl/I’m a story/With nothing to do.” She sees herself as the mirror of a godless man, looks for a place to put the anger in, “Find somewhere to place my rage safely,” and concludes that she is numb enough to skip the Novocaine. She keeps a round in the chamber and invites the game. This song sounds colder than any of the others on the album, and it is the most alive one.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite tracks: “Parking Lot,” “The Art of Letting Go,” “September”