Album Review: PRAY FOR ME by RAAHiiM
RAAHiiM talks to God about women and talks to women about God. The confusion between those conversations is the truest thing here.
On “96 Camry,” RAAHiiM wants to love a woman the way his dad loved his car. Wouldn’t trade her for nothing, ride with her till she falls apart. Second half of the same song swaps it out. Love like his mama loved her cigarettes (draws you close, makes it hard to breathe), love like his granny loved her bible (every page of you he reads). Not throwaway lines. They sketch a 29-year-old Scarborough kid whose entire vocabulary for devotion was built in somebody else’s living room, borrowed from people who stayed. RAAHiiM grew up in the church, piano bench and hymn books and the whole Sunday morning regime, and his parents’ house in Toronto’s east end pumped Caribbean records through turntable speakers his dad hauled to family gatherings. PRAY FOR ME, his third LP and the planned end of a trilogy that started with ii KNEW BETTER, carries that upbringing in its bones. Cornball on paper, the Camry comparisons. Sung over Kevin Ekofo’s pillowy keys with RAAHiiM’s falsetto cracking around the edges.
Every man on this record keeps admitting he’s the problem, and none of them have a plan. On “Just Like Me,” RAAHiiM is thinking about last names and diamond rings one moment and confessing, mid-bar, that the streets keep calling: “Baby, I don’t wanna be a dog but woo/Who am I to change?” He floats it with a shrug in his throat. No answer expected. Over on “SLIDE4U (Hating),” he tells a woman he wants to give her love and devotion “in the worst ways, girl, I’m selfish.” Karri steps in after him, Bay Area smoothness intact, rhyming about fucking to Curtis Mayfield and calling her a walking red flag he couldn’t stop chasing. “Falling Off” goes through the same cycle—are they still friends, did he cross the line again—but Bay Swag’s guest slot stumbles in from a different album entirely. Karri fits; Bay Swag doesn’t.
Prayer language soaks every corner of this LP, and the further it strays from any actual congregation, the more interesting it becomes. On “PRAYERSFORMYEX,” RAAHiiM borrows the shape of an altar call and fills it with smoke, praying that guys stay away from him, that she doesn’t lose herself, that she makes it rain when her thoughts are clouded. Midway through, the mask slips. “Praise the Lord, oh my soul/Hands up, give it all to the lord/Swear I haven’t seen a church in so long/I’ve been getting way too high and laying low.” Jordon Manswell and Marc Crimi lay down organ tones and a drum pattern that sits somewhere between a hymnal processional and a late-night slow jam. RAAHiiM rides both moods without picking one. He left the pew years ago and still thinks in its grammar. A sampled preacher sermonizing about lustful sin and the devil’s grip kicks off “On God.” RAAHiiM follows with a woman who feels like heaven when their love is hellish: “I put that on God/I put that on everything.” Preacher talk and pillow talk bleed into each other so completely you can’t tell if he’s swearing an oath or begging forgiveness. It never sorts itself out.
Supa Dups and Jordon Manswell’s production on “WiiCKEDEST” rumbles with dancehall bass and patois phrasing, and BEAM’s contribution burrows deeper into the Jamaican vernacular, dropping Port More references and butterfly tattoo lines with a loose-limbed energy. Smartest move on the whole record is splitting it into two halves. Part I is all swagger and instruction (“You haffi bend over, bend over/you haffi take over”). Part II deflates into a man whose partner dipped out, begging her to “Show me your body like I’m new or somethin’/Hold onto me like I’ma lose somethin’.” Command to plea, no seam in between. “SAVE A MOMENT” coasts on the same Caribbean current, 92 degrees and Hennessy and the patois-inflected hook, “Feels like tings could gwan way you pree me,” and it doesn’t try to be anything deeper than a party cut.
Bitterest stretch comes when RAAHiiM stops flirting and starts counting scars. “20’s” catalogues the decade without mercy: “Twenties for a broken heart/Twenties trying not to fall apart/Twenty like you x’d me out/Twenty like your fakest friends/Twenty like the club won’t even let you in.” Under all that, the bleaker story. “We never pray/But somehow you always get on your knees sometimes.” Temporary pleasure, no future, good enough for a few more moments, and nothing past that. On “Don’t Believe It,” the sting takes a different angle: “The last text sent said we should get married/Last sex before you left went green like envy.” “Too Much” drifts over the slowest beat on the whole thing while RAAHiiM wonders whether he did too much, turned her up too much. Its closing stretch admits what the rest of the song couldn’t say out loud. “I hate the fucking distance/Feels like something’s missing/Think I just need loving/Something that’s consistent.”
PRAY FOR ME doesn’t fix anything that ii KNEW BETTER and BUT IF iiM HONEST laid out. RAAHiiM is still the guy who wants to get married and, in the same song, wonders who he is to change. But the honesty has sharpened. He co-produced several of these joints himself, and when his singing instincts and his production ear lock in—the falsetto arcing over organ on “PRAYERSFORMYEX,” the Camry hook’s warm stupidity, the dancehall stomp on “WiiCKEDEST”—it’s genuinely strong R&B from a city that’s been quiet on that front since dvsn went ghost. Weak spots are real. Bay Swag’s feature on “Falling Off” kills momentum, and “SAVE A MOMENT” is fun without sticking. But RAAHiiM is a better songwriter than those lapses suggest, and when his voice, his church-kid guilt, and his Caribbean ear all point the same direction, he makes a sound nobody in Toronto’s current class is making.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “96 Camry,” “WiiCKEDEST,” “PRAYERSFORMYEX”