Album Review: YEARNALISM by Baby Rose
After two albums made to steady herself, Baby Rose turns the contralto outward, and the yearning finally has a direction.
The term comes from a joke. Buried somewhere in the files of Baby Rose, there must’ve been a joke line she had typed out half-heartedly but kept because it described something she had been doing anyway: majoring in yearnalism (a play on journalism). Being born in Washington, D.C., raised in Fayetteville after she turned eleven and now living in Atlanta, she is one of those artists whose contralto voices come even before the songs. While her first two records were made to strengthen her, YEARNALISM has been assembled by her with co-executive producer BIAKO. Along with a post-production team from roughly seventy sketches through tape, aimed at somebody else in the room.
In a sense, the change immediately in the way she leaves. “When I’m Gone” is an ending that scores without gloating, and the second verse drives the nail right in: “You a cancer/Might fuck around, make me raise my standards/Now when you call, I won’t answer.” She is not hurt there; she is done with it, and in the outro, it is stated twice again for it to get its weight: “You’re a waste of time... I’m on my grind, I’ll be just fine.” “Better” is an identical song but with the firmer groove (full-band backbeat with much more power behind it), and the accounting becomes even harsher there: “I got used to you letting me down/How can you ask me to keep you around?” She has already left and is offended at his surprise: “Don’t act surprised by the way I’m leaving.”
However, what saves these from being pure victories is how often the same woman comes back and reverses her direction. “The Reason” is an honest statement that leaving and staying are both parts of the same muscle. “Searching for your heart when mine is on the line/Almost missed my flight just tryna make it right,” she sings, and the hook reverses the situation like a mirror does: “Every time I find a reason/I fall right back into the feeling/Girl, I’m still deep in over you”. “Dressed In Metal” catches the process in the middle of the fight, 3 AM and starting from the very beginning again, and names the armor she cannot take off: “It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad/All this armor that I keep on my back.” Put those together with the songs above, and willpower becomes a secondary issue. The main one becomes a person who knows exactly what he or she needs to do but sometimes cannot.
On “Is This Love,” Elmiene takes the second verse, answering her open-ended questions with his, his light voice balancing against hers and both refusing to conclude anything in the end: “Is this love? Are you sure?/Is this the way it’s meant to be?” “Friends Again” is the tougher of the two. Leon Thomas trades verses with her on the eternal question, whether one night destroyed the friendship that mattered more, and delivers the line with the simple and naked ache: “I tried to bury this rose/But in my mind, you still grow.” The song concludes with the simple speech without any singing: “I just miss my best friend.” No hook could convey that more precisely, and she knew well enough not to try.
“Sunday” is the song that finally allows the record to breathe. It is the longest track in this album and the warmest one too, hung-over morning turning into resurrection, birds outside and clothes on the floor, and the decision to let the day mend what it can. The chorus consecrates the day itself: “Made for smiling/... Dancing in my kitchen/... Made for making something of all the mess I made.” The second verse introduces the whole family into the scene, the dinner prepared by the mother and her uncle’s sermon in the church still resonating in her ears: “Came right back from church and I heard my uncle’s sermon/It said love what we need to sustain.” Having listened to the sequence of songs telling about one woman struggling with her heart, the churches and the kitchen open up the picture, and “Sunday” makes the reach justified.
With ”All My Love,” it receives the lift from the flute and güiro while the message of an open heart addressed to strangers becomes clear. The best verse is the train scene, an older woman sitting next to the window and holding her newborn grandchild: “Got a new perspective on everything.” The chorus is an invitation to company to anyone willing: “So every time you hear this song/I’m sending you all my love.” Coming after the series of songs about the man that let her down, it is a genuine turn outward, the idea made audible.
If there is any flaw in the record, it might be in the string of slow songs with the identical bass, drums, and chord bed while the voice supplies almost all the movement and some of them ask for the burden that the arrangement is not ready to give back. However, it is merely a texture problem, and even the sparsest tracks keep their integrity. “Believe Me” is a midnight phone call, the excuses as flimsy as any but with no shame about it. “I saw you in my dream/I swear it meant something midnight,” she sings, a grown woman making up an excuse to hear the voice before it vanishes forever. “Let Me Go” proclaims its release a decision taken twice: “If you really mean it, then won’t you show me then?/If you love me, let me go.” “But, Nvm” keeps circling the phrase “Gave you all my love... But nevermind.”
The finale “Jasmine’s Sonnet” speaks to her younger self, the one she lost somewhere along the way, and in doing so it names her rawest wound: “Like an old tree in a storm, I was barely holding on.” In the chorus, the address is transformed into a benediction, “Now I’m basking in your light/Oh, let your love come,” before she gets to the thing that this whole album has been circling around and around without ever pulling its punches: “I was a wound that was open in bed.” That’s YEARNALISM in a nutshell—a document of everything she wanted, delivered by a woman who has finally realized that owning that desire is the hard, necessary thing.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “But, Nvm,” “Sunday,” “All My Love”