Mixtape Review: Make You Feel by Dylan Sinclair
On a tape about filming sex and keeping a woman home, Dylan Sinclair writes love as ownership. The craft is good enough to make most of it sound like wanting.
The most extreme statement to ever grace Make You Feel: an avowed promise to slay. To a lover who, for a few minutes on the song, hears it as evidence of how far Dylan Sinclair’s love can go—a vow to come and retrieve any man too willing to meet her eye on the floor—he matches it with all the shallower forms of desire running on the same logic. Money is at the ready for her to carry, the camera is wanted in the bedroom, instruction issued to step away from the club doors. But across the breadth of this mixtape, mostly through the Canadian singer’s collaborations with producer Jordon Manswell, that desire is rarely anything less than ownership.
Plain wanting, with nothing added, goes largely unsignified. “Rich Luv” puts money right up front. He sings that he aims to make enough of it till his dying day, that he counts his stacks multiplied times the number of women currently crammed into his sightlines, twenty for each of those twenty bands that hit his account one recent night. When his subject matters shift to her, however, what the Toronto singer has at the ready is provision: “All you need to know is I want to provide.” Chase Shakur jumps in; the exchange lurches close to Ciara’s name drop that is too crazy to write in full. The reasoning is that the capacity for provision for the woman he loves is indistinguishable from the capacity for the love itself. This reasoning returns in “Spray,” when his obligations pull him away, but his promise of financial sustenance means he’ll provide his faithfulness from a distance, “keep her street.” Care, at least from his remove, materializes as an electronic wire transfer. He speaks in his most trusted language about emotions.
In “Denim,” for instance, penmanship may at times prove to outweigh the rest of the singer’s arsenal, transforming his presence into clothing. His existence is defined as a piece of her wardrobe. The chorus presents the act of his wearing of her body as an ache to which is to keep going back to.
“Something ‘bout me in my denim
Faded blue but you still feel the venom
Wore me out, call it vintage
Hung me up, still can't quit this.”
Then halfway through, the fabric thins and you see him in his elemental, ghostly state. That may seem like the first occasion in this set when the music really seems interested in two bodies pushing and pulling against each other, instead of the gifts he lays at her feet.
A possessiveness also peeks through the track, as “Stay Home” turns it up a notch. The whole song is a directive. Turn down men trying to link with her, don’t accept drinks, don’t answer what your name is, and come over to my house instead of doing anything else. The song doesn’t shy away from a man not fully trusting his girlfriend. She’s been good at lying, and he still holds something back, reminding her what she stands to lose if she keeps taking risks. All he can offer here is an arrangement of words that sound an awful lot like an attempt at a melody; the lyrics from his “He’s Not Me” cut also have this tendency in the part where he assumes his last fling was not in the game, but he’s willing to wait until she chooses for him anyway. They know this argument has concluded, and the bridge is for reassurance.
The highlight of this tape may be “Spray,” a declaration that also holds its footing quite well. The storyline begins with two friends deciding to finally give their feelings the go-ahead, and this has come with armed protection. This man describes his girlfriend as a true gun, and he’d make anyone get lost, all in the catchy hook (“Would I kill for this girl?/Yes, I would spray”). It can be seen here that JVCK JAMES’ contribution added that to the track’s mixture of confession and claim. However, the death being alluded to is that figure of how far the man says he is ready to go and has not been made a statistic in his life. Along with this, this threat is accompanied by confessions as modest as making money and of “Now I’m vulnerable,” where his threat fades somewhat as he reveals that he now has nothing to lose but this relationship.
It also feels more like this, half the fun of having someone to shag is the watching—either you or them or someone else. “Squeeze” sees him flagrantly ignore the one rule he previously swore he’d never break (against PDA), happily getting handsy with her against the backdrop of a packed club where everyone, of course, gets to peek. “He keeps thinking that this is just not his style. “On Cam” shifts the focus from the watching and on o a camera in his bedroom. For the first two-thirds, it remains pretty inconsequential, a simple sum of the night’s noise (“squeak squeak”), and a brief run through some clean sheets. He sells it with an invitation that he frames as nothing more than a little something for her. After all, it’s the memories she wants to make.
The chase leads to somewhere that, at last, sounds like it sticks. He readily takes responsibility for all the hearts he’s smashed on “Safe to Say” and assures her he won’t ever be like that again, that he wants to know whether she will be his lady while having babies. He’ll give up his career for her, and together they’ll grow old until they reach the grave. He even says that, “When you around, I start to get possessive/And I’m not ashamed.” He is, through and through, the same person, but the language is contained in a proposal. The offer and the holding back no longer pretend they’re distinct concepts.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Denim,” “On Cam,” “Safe to Say”