Album Review: This Feels Like Home by Adria Kain
Four years after a Polaris-longlisted debut, the Toronto singer cuts down to eight tracks and finds her stride on the slow ones.
For four years before joining ArtHaus in the fall of 2020, Kain lived with her grandparents. The Kain’s relationship with her grandparents covered the beginning of her 20’s, while her peers were signing leases and opening doors to their first apartments. This Feels Like Home is her real album. Adria Kain sings, “But I know this house isn’t really my home,” in “Long Way from Home,” the last track of her album.
“Right Where You Left Me” is Kain’s first single where she writes about driving down Sunset Boulevard. She recalls the 90s, remembers the car, and reminisces about when she was 12 and left her childhood house. There is no limitation to Kain’s imagination, and she writes about the mundane things that fill a room.
To Kain, her childhood house was where she learned to sing by mimicking Aaliyah. It seems that with every line she sings, she delivers that Aaliyah’s presence is strong. Kain doesn’t take breaks in between her lyrics. Kain’s producers give her the luxury of a clean, quiet room free from doubt. Writing gives her that room too. In her lyric, “What am I if I don’t come back to me?” Kain fills in the blank space doubt usually occupies.
At the midpoint of the same song, donSMITH slows down, arriving in a bar with a voice a step lower than Kain’s and half a beat behind the tempo. The lone guest artist on the album plays off a line from Kain that he’s been developing for the last two tracks, “You learn the ego is heavy, its absence is balancing.” In donSMITH’s view, self-reliance is a practice and, more importantly, a pathway. The line “Permanent lessons I got from temporary chapters” reassesses the preceding lines as ongoing processes rather than a state of recovery. Kain resumes her verse afterwards, then transforms from a request to a deadline for the girl to stop waiting.
Over the six years spent on When Flowers Bloom (2016-2022), Kain let songs expand organically with multiple vamps and outros. This Feels Like Home was created in four years and has an opener that runs for a little over three minutes. Kain’s “Set Me Free” is a one-time prayer. However, her debut album lets her prayer repeat for a full verse. Kain’s efforts, such as DE{com}pressed, have sketches rather than songs. Something has been lost in her more recent projects.
The slow-burner “So Bad” begins with a laidback breath, arpeggiated electric guitar chords, and the drums that drop in. 4th Pyramid and Spencer Muscio’s production hoversa relaxed tempo map, removing it from the percussive fold, and Kain then moves downward, an unexplored territory elsewhere on the record, leaving vocal smoke that lingers with a relaxed cadence for softer spoken consonants to escape, “Love the way it feels when you wrap my body in between your legs.” The rest of the album has its share of sexual desire. Here it doesn’t. The most folk and coffeehouse production element belongs to Kain caressing curves, distracting in the sultriness of outward thighs, and placing her hands in that region. The contrast of shyness to the explicit nature of the body contact on her thighs, along with the suggestive nature of Kain inviting you to get on her, makes the production stand out.
Kain centers her narrative at the piano built for her by Gyimah Kogi Daenan and Josh Grant to perform a track from her latest album. She states, “Maybe I’m afraid that we’re alike, trying to make a way for peace of mind,” with a straightforward verbal equality which sets her “Long Way from Home” title and track on a level playing field. She then says, “When you gave me your all/But I know this house isn’t really my home,” to explain that the relationship the album has reflected on for the past seven tracks and circled for the past seven tracks was never her right to claim. Kain denies the homecoming that the album’s advertising promises, which has been anticipated since the March announcement post.
Around the middle of the album, “Can’t Forget You,” Kain leans on lines like “broken memories I can’t erase” that could belong to anyone. “Maybe...” spends its second verse on the rhyme of “before” and “adore you” before settling into “I got you, baby,” a refrain with no second idea. “Wrapped in my fingers like manila rope” is the one image worth keeping on “Kaleidoscope,” set inside a song that surrounds it with placeholder. The valley is real. Kain’s best work here would fit on a stronger EP than this album.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Right Where You Left Me,” “So Bad,” “Long Way from Home”