EP Review: For a Good Time… by Odeal
Told as a teenager in Anambra State that R&B wouldn’t play there, Odeal builds an Afro-R&B set whose writing about wanting carries the sex.
It is in Awka, in Anambra State, where Odeal, a fourteen-year-old, primitively arrived from London, went to boarding school, lived with his father and started making his own music in a youth club studio. The wisdom of the working musicians, as he told Billboard, was that “R&B doesn’t work over here.” He kept the R&B. Born to Igbo Nigerian parents, he had traveled back and forth between Europe and Nigeria throughout childhood, ending up in the UK around the age of six. He created OVMBR, which is an acronym for November, an imprint that operates now in partnership with LVRN.
She does not have to adjust her words to his liking. He tells her they do not have to argue with the funk, and he needs her once a day. “Get Down” makes the smallest demand of everyone in the room. The offer on the nostalgic “After the Club” comes with detailed logistics: “It was just last week, I told my girl that you come home with me/Now it’s half past 3, after the club, and it’s her, you, and me,” he explains, going into detail, her lips on his pillow, his own girl controlling the situation, the two of them being a team while she plays on both sides. His and hers, and hers. The Craig David interpolation underneath is a nice touch, while he adds the only line that speaks of what he is ready to give up for the night. They entered the club from the front door and left through the back door.
On a late Wednesday night, he goes out into the city with his wishes. Desperate for a feeling, no anxiety and nothing but ambition with no wasted motion. With the uptempo, Amapiano vibe of “Bluey Vitton,” he vows to stand ten toes down as the disc turns, and asks whether she is for the night like his wristband. The bouncer tells him that it is impossible. He promises to run halfway and keep running till they stop him. In one of these places he calls himself desperate and in need of a hit after a long day, and he makes her a promise with the threat of violence: “I could save you/But I’d have to play you/Really wanna take you ‘round.” He asks for another chance to dance and leaves it at that.
Jorja Smith hops on the P2J-assisted “Coming Home” and calls him an actor. If attention is what he needs, she says, she has got it for him, and she is a movie lover, and he enjoys it better until his own feelings kick in and he becomes too involved. He had made this struggle sound like a career, and the two of them were professionals in arguments, him being addicted to the drama that she was drowning him with, twisted by her tongue and not finished with it. A summer in her garden is all that he wants her to agree to, provided that she stops breaking her promises. When she takes the hook, she turned on its head about the energy and makes him the one who takes it, and he comes home anyway, on one condition that she understands it. The useless purchase on “Trying Things” was his time that he spent buying, because he had promised not to be ready to love her. Other men were giving her flowers, heels, and matching purses, and he asks her to tell them that their attempts are not working. With the neo-soul backdrop of Anoop D’Souza, GuiltyBeatz, and Jonah Christian, Ogi sings behind him. They make an agreement that is less than a promise: “I guess we’re trying things/And that’s fine with me.” Two people who cannot be together, falling apart each time they stop talking, agreeing to remain flexible—this is the most honest thing that he wrote about a woman.
He splits his calendar in two, he once admitted, and the African-sounding records come in the summer and R&B in the winter, when things calm down. He released these on the last day of July, on OVMBR and LVRN. R&B took the summer spot. He sings on “Love n Hate” that her heart has seen its mileage and offers to fill her up when her tank is on E. Gasolina. He has traveled around the world and never had a feeling like this one. The lyrics above it are congruous. He tells her that it isn’t over until somebody lights her soul on fire, and then calls out what he got instead—love and hate, since she does not mean the words that she says.
On “Rush,” he repeats her denial back to her in her own words: “This is not a fairytale/That’s what you say until my hands around you/And the night is over, very real.” Both the speeds are in the chorus. If they rush, there will be nothing that will make him stay. When they touch, the whole world can wait. Later on, he asks whether she noticed how his world spins upside down each time she walks away. This is the one record where somebody else controls the night, and he is better at it.
Favorite Track(s): “Bluey Vitton,” “Coming Home,” “Trying Things”