Album Review: SE9 by Skye Newman
A 22-year-old from South East London names the household damage in present tense and pays it down in weed and walking shoes. The standing-up songs run first, but the wound beneath them sets the place.
There’s less than a second for the worst line on “Man of the House,” a child’s desire and a mother’s cocaine compressed into one bar about love getting snorted away on lines before school, and the melody just walks over it with no time to grieve. Skye Newman’s handling of the rest of her family is similar. She lines the police up on “Family Matters”—a death who came without being called, a brother whose habit went from schoolyard pot to something with a nastier name, and then shrugs it all away, a repeat tic: it is what it is. Where another singer might pull for catharsis, she ends her verses with a jab, or a punchline, and leaves it up to you to find the grief. Out of SE9 (the same name as her project) and only 22, she keeps every wound just below the surface so you can’t see her bleed, explaining her damages in the flat tone she might use to list groceries.
But held up to the light, the lethargy reveals an underlying choice. She lays all the blame for the inheritance at one parent’s door: “You passed your shit to me/But you didn’t know you did it.” She turns the blame into a question leveled upwards, “How can you raise a life/Without figuring out your own first?” and her answer is to grab onto what set off the cycle: “I do know the puff helps, so I’ll smoke.” She doesn’t linger to diagnose. She lights the same joint her mother’s generation lit, stays in the room with it.
On” Family Matters,” weed is “my perfume” at school-an everyday fact she wore like a uniform. By “Vicious Cycle,” it’s something that “helps,” and by “My Addiction,” it’s merely what she’s smoking while someone else does lines nearby. Boo and Luis Navidad provide almost nothing for “My Addiction,” just a bench on Avery Hill, a joint, an old hook sung to nobody, and the emptiness of the beat makes the loneliness sound deliberate. Then the drug talk shifts to her man: “Don’t pass judgment, I just pass smoke/‘Cause my addiction’s a man,” the one she can’t quit “without withdrawals.” Even the joint on her own track is something for her hands to do while she waits for him to text back.
The return to the past is the center of all the breakup songs on the record, and they vary greatly in quality. “Walk” is the high point of the whole project-a fury distilled into a pinpoint directed squarely at a single man, with the exit given shape as footwear: “It’s not blood on the pavement, it’s Christian Louboutin/Your Air Force 1’s look shit on you/I got blisters tryna walk in your shoes.” There is absolutely no mistaking who this is directed toward. But the precision can’t last. The partner on “Out Out” can’t “love me loudly”; the one on “Lost Myself to a Man” sends her “round the bend.” Swap one man for the other, and nothing would change. The steady hand that serves her well on the family tracks is the very same steady hand that drains her partners on the weaker breakup tracks, and it takes a face to make the others excel.
The element that stops the album from collapsing into one big puddle of pain is who Newman chooses to populate her frame against those men. “Woman I Am” is the only time the guard comes down, and it’s for her friends, those who will “clean up my sick, go down if I trip,” those who stand in the gap of a pregnancy scare without so much as a wrinkle in their brow: “If I’m scared, you’ll go in and buy what I need.” The men receive her monotone; this sisterhood receives her warmest writing on either album. It is pure logistics, and never comfort, because comfort would be a lie, and it’s logistics that kept her alive. “Biology can’t compete with us” is the most grounded thing she says on the entire record. The order matters; the standing up album comes first, the one with the stated source: the women who let her be loud about everything she had endured.
Thus, the recovery songs don’t pretend to be happy endings. “Crawling” declares its own progress in its title and resists overselling: “soon I will be walking” sits comfortably next to “I do know the puff helps, so I’ll smoke.” Her only remaining power is of small-scale defiance: “No wall is gonna stop me, no,” and her peace sounds mostly believable: “Crazy home now makes me proud.” Her one misstep occurs at the end. After twelve tracks of candor without sweetness, “Smoke Rings” allows for one moment of tender longing: “It’s more addictive than drugs,” and her steady gaze finally softens toward the man she lost. Amy Winehouse threw herself face-first into the wreck at the end of Back to Black and was absolutely right. Newman drives away from this record, her headlights low, her farewell sweet, and a singer this unsentimental earns her tenderness everywhere but the place where she actually used it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Man of the House,” “Walk,” “Family Matters”