Album Review: sounds for someone by Elmiene
The British-Sudanese singer’s first album is addressed almost entirely to his late father. It’s the most quietly devastating R&B debut in years.
In 2021, a backyard D’Angelo cover filmed in Oxford, England (tracksuit bottoms, crumbling garage) made its way to Missy Elliott, Pharrell, and Questlove inside a few weeks. The kid behind the camera was a 20-year-old poetry student named Abdala Elamin, who performs as Elmiene. His unreleased song “Golden” was picked by Louis Vuitton music director Benji B for Virgil Abloh’s final fashion show in Miami, played two days after Abloh’s death, and suddenly Elmiene’s first single was a memorial for a man he’d never met. That accidental weight could have been a trap. Instead, he spent three years burning through EPs: EL-MEAN, Marking My Time (with Sampha, Syd, BADBADNOTGOOD), Anyway I Can (with D’Mile), For the Deported, the Prince-indebted Heat the Streets mixtape, all while finishing his degree at Bournemouth and weighing a fallback career as a security guard. sounds for someone is the album all that preparation was leading toward, and it doesn’t waste time proving he belongs in the room. He already proved that. This one is private.
Elmiene has said he kept writing and then looked back and realized seven out of ten songs were about his dad. “Cry Against the Wind,” the album’s emotional axis, puts that in the plainest terms. He’s tired of someone calling with the same old stories, the back and forth bores him, the ringing never ends. Then the gut-punch—“By now you’ll surely feel/And think it’s really real/That I hate you, my Jameel/But I’d watch the whole world drown/To see you cry again.” It’s a horrible, beautiful admission. He can’t cry against the wind because it dries his tears, and the dried tears become stains of regret. The song’s final stretch drops all pretense:
“Isn’t it crazy how fast that now turns to past and fades away?
On a Friday you’re born, this Friday he’s gone
We’re made of clay.”
Andrew Aged and Buddy Ross give those words a bed of warm keys and hushed percussion that never competes with Elmiene’s singing, which is exactly right. The production treats the song like a conversation you’re overhearing through a wall.
“Saviour,” produced by Sampha, splits in a different direction. The track runs brighter and more synthetic than anything on Elmiene’s earlier EPs, and he plays most of the instruments himself. He’s pleading with someone, a father or the idea of one, to be his protector, to promise for his innocence and fight for ages. “Take a breath and realize you left me in this danger,” he sings, and the accusation in those words sits right next to the need. The chorus asks a question he already knows the answer to—“Why can’t we just relax?” The please just blow it all away that carries through would be corny from someone less committed to meaning it. Elmiene sings it like a man trying to blow out a candle with no wick.
Almost every song on sounds for someone asks for something. “Honour,” with Baby Rose’s voice winding around his in the low end, requests the simplest thing imaginable—believe in me. “I’ve always been the one to doubt myself/Convinced I don’t deserve a ‘someone else,’” he admits, and then spends the rest of the song trying to earn what he’s afraid to expect. “Don’t Say Maybe,” the album’s most rhythmically insistent cut (Ghost-Note and No I.D. supplying a snapping, uptempo groove that breaks from the album’s prevailing warmth), takes the same impulse and strips the patience out of it. “I always hated when you treated me like a child,” he opens, and the chorus is blunt. Just say yes, just say no, don’t say maybe. That directness sounds different for Elmiene. The songs addressed to his father plead and circle. This one draws a line.
Not everything on the album bleeds. “Reclusive” is probably the most fun anyone’s ever had admitting they don’t want to leave the house. Elmiene has credited Biz Markie’s ability to make the mundane memorable, and you can hear that in the way the song zooms into the tiniest details of inertia: wake up, play video games, think you need a change, don’t change. “I ain’t even gonna lie/Not a social butterfly” is as self-aware as this album gets, and the Gitelman production (piano and drums that gradually widen into a busier arrangement) treats his reclusiveness as a fact of life, not a problem to solve. The romantic songs carry more weight than they might on a less emotionally loaded album. “Lie With Me” makes a painful request. Fake it, lie, make me believe what you don’t, just until I can move on. He knows it’s over. He’s asking for one more night of pretending. “Light by the Window” puts Elmiene in a locked room with an empty glass and a double bed, hiding for days by the window, wondering if leaving would make any difference. Saadiq’s presence brings a weight to the arrangement that Elmiene meets without strain, and this section (“Detrimental to my vision/Without my glasses you’re far away with no precision”) is the kind of odd, specific image that separates a good lyricist from someone filling bars.
Ghost-Note and OzMoses Arketex handle the majority of the album’s back half, and their production keeps to a steady, mid-tempo pulse that gives Elmiene room to phrase long. The consistency pays off when the songwriting justifies it (”Lonely People,” a mutual codependence anthem where two people agree to stay small together, gains from the controlled simmer) and drags mildly when it doesn’t (”Special,” a sweet ordinary-day love song, sits comfortably in the same tempo and register as three or four songs around it). But Elmiene’s tenor is a remarkable instrument for this kind of sustained quiet. He dips into falsetto when the lyric needs air and drops to a low murmur when it doesn’t, and neither gear sounds forced. Raised in Oxford by his Sudanese mother, the son of a poet grandmother and a musician grandfather, he sings like someone who grew up in a house where expression wasn’t optional but volume was negotiable. On “Told You I’ll Make It,” he reaches his father’s house, puts the key in the lock, and it won’t turn. “How much have I changed?/Do you hate me now?” He promised he’d be there, and he’s making good. The door is still closed.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Cry Against the Wind,” “Lie With Me,” “Light by the Window”