Mixtape Review: Resurrection by Chlöe & Timbaland
Across her mixtape with Timbaland, Chlöe runs every romance, from seduction to kiss-off to confession.
For nearly a decade, Chloe Bailey was one half of Chlöe x Halle, an alliance with her sister Halle that felt designed from its outset for voices built to interlock, and launching her solo career never fully dissolved the impulse to partner. The title of her new mixtape, Resurrection, puts a partner’s name right on the cover, yet Timbaland only ever sounds off to the sides, counting her in, answering her hooks, adding signature tags. The singing on this short effort is all hers; so is the writing (with the help of Quiana Griffin and others), and that’s the part you should really pay attention to. Her first two albums (In Pieces, Trouble In Paradise) showcase her vocal talent, but the writing and consistency don’t match up to par with what she can fully execute. On this project, she is more motivated and focused than ever. Chlöe has elected herself the sole arbiter of what happened, the keeper of the gate (who goes in, who goes out), and the only one to determine the asking price for whatever it is she might be willing to surrender.
Chlöe commands on “Talking Dirty,” one of the early standouts, “Come inside, I’ve been thinking about this all night,” which comes across more as an order than an invitation. Orders are something she’s giving with some regularity here: “Tonight it’s me on top, tonight, boy, we won’t stop.” But the hunger isn’t half of it. The same song also puts a price tag on the door: “I don’t give it up to somebody who’s just anybody,” and the conditions are soon enough even plainer: “Gotta treat me like a lady, make me your only baby.” Timbaland hums away in the background with his signature “Fikki, fikki” and a flat “I like it right there”; he’s a hype man with no real say in the matter. Before the section comes around to “What you waiting for? We both grown,” the seduction of this song is a contract Chlöe has composed herself, and she holds the pen.
A man tells Chlöe that she’s selfish on “Priorities,” and declares that he needs space. Her instinct isn’t to placate, but the opposite. On the thing he’s complained about—“Cause I really don’t know how to be reckless/What if the structured life is what keeps me goin’?”—she doesn’t apologize or retreat. Instead, she places it as a clarification: “I hold myself, it ain’t much, you just thinkin’ too deep.” When money enters the fray, Chlöe simply names her rate: “Can’t put it on me unless you tryna sign a pre.” And in the midst of all of her self-possession comes that “Throw that ass back” chant. Her chorus captures the stand-off by reducing it to a single, unresolved question: “Do I love these?” The “these” refers to the priorities.
Quite a few men here get kiss-off treatment, and she gives none of them any grace. “Caught” is the best among them—a cheating song that catches the man dead in the act and then provides him no dignity on the way down. She has the proof: “I pulled your every card, I got receipts.” Even better, she has the petty detail that wounds more than proof itself: “Motel 6, not even DoubleTree.” She floats the worst possibility, that he wanted to be caught: “If you wanted me to catch you,” and then the bridge follows him out to the street, overtly enjoying it: “All up in the streets, ain’t got nowhere to call your home/How you feeling all alone?” “Sensitive,” the most compressed song here, does the same play in miniature, a man sulking in a bed he’s been evicted from: “Your tears ain’t working, I won’t take you back.” “Mama’s Boy” offers up the clearest line on the set: “I stay calm, you get louder/I move on, you feel smaller.” At the end of “Mama’s Boy,” the heat is off, and she finishes by telling him, “I’m already over it, yeah, I got my karma.” And she means it.
She asks on “Better Than She Can,” certain she’s the better option: “Why you wasting your time with them other women?” She pitches herself as the upgrade: “I upgradin’ everything in your life.” She sells it all while protesting that she doesn’t need him: “I let you leave, but I got my own, yeah, I’m independent.” She’s honest about the leverage: “It boost your ego when you reach between my thighs.” Two songs later, on “Believer,” she’s hopped across to the other side of that same love triangle, now the homewrecker. Timbaland counts her in with his uptempo maestro centerpiece, and she makes her move with an easy confidence, no hint of guilt: “I don’t care about your situation/Can’t fight the temptation.” She plays both the prize in one song and the Other Woman in the next, utterly self-assured either way.
There’s a run of pure adoration that the lyrics don’t really quite fill. “World on Fire” offers total devotion: “I cannot live my life without, now it’s very scary,” “I lose my mind, yeah, if you left me.” But the adoration is generic, and a phrase such as “I’m basking your glory, the warm feels so good in your arms all my life” is the kind of sentiment any love-struck person might blurt out. “Belong to You” pulls in a twin-flame mysticism (“Do you get the feeling we had met a lifetime before?”) and includes a sweet promise, “I would pick you a thousand times,” but it also contains the bewildering “Horace and Pete so crazy,” a non sequitur that goes nowhere. “Main Attraction” is the slightest song here, attraction stated and restated without anything to support it: “You’re too attractive,” “Here’s my number, you can call that.” It’s more of a hook looking for a song.
The fact of the matter is, her quality not only doesn’t slip in this case, but it also improves the instant she gets off the high ground. The bulk of “On Your Own” is, frankly, nasty teasing about the incapable man, but the bridge makes an unheralded retreat: “Said you need someone, but everybody does/I’m no different, I’m just the same as you.” It’s the first time I have ever felt she thought to consider one of her male opponents. It comes off a step better in “Jittery” too, the whole of which follows this pattern: “Ain’t my fault I think about you still,” then spent taking that back in a frenzy of responsibility-taking (“You dipped it, it’s all on me.”), owning that all you had was the one perspective (“I could never see it from your side ‘til/I reflected, sitting back with myself,”) and to the drink in the back of that (“Took it out my life on the nights I got too wasted”). “The devil got me by my tooth now,” provides a startling, wonderful glimpse of remorse—the practice delivery of an apology she cannot quite choke out.
For “Hold It,” this puts her as early as the third track on an island with some rich guy and a hotel room and far too much champagne: “Darling, got me too loose, no, I said too much.” It is the nearest she comes to having an adventure. That hook goes all the way up to an idea; in her world, even this moment of surrender comes all the way up to “Maybe it’s something,” not quite to “It’s something.” Still, three drinks deep on a beach with the booking already confirmed, it is her still and hers alone that she chooses to take the blame for how it’s all gone wrong. If Chlöe continues to go down that path of artistry, she will be unstoppable as a force to be reckoned with in the R&B/pop space.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Priorities,” “Caught,” “Jittery”