- On the London artist's spectacular mixtape, homey R&B and quiet reflections follow night into day.
- Before she released Sunsetters / Daybreakers, Tyson featured on two beloved electronic music records. Joy Orbison distorted her vocals over over spaced-out garage on his album still slipping vol. 1. Then Tyson appeared, breezily and tenderly, on Dean Blunt's recent Give Me A Moment EP. She seems at home in these collaborative environments—she first entered the electronic music scene in the early '10s as part of the musical duo PANES with Shaun Savage, where her hooks floated over overcast, minimalist electronics.
The solo projects she's released since leaving PANES prove Tyson can excel on her own. Her Pisces Problems EP harkened back to Floetry-era R&B, melding smoky choruses and incense-perfumed beats. Her mixtape, Sunsetters / Daybreakers, brings this relaxed ambience into an electronic music context and maintains the soulfulness of previous releases. The trip-hop of "Choose Peace" is slow-moving and subtly vicious, calling to mind Portishead's mastery of relaxed production and razor-sharp lyrics with lines like "You handle yourself / I take care of me."
By way of rRoxymore's deft touch, fuzzy chords lapse into dub on "Above The Light." The Joy Orbison-produced "Nothing" paints his signature synth work on a new canvas. Images of smoke pluming from a gaping mouth come to mind as psychedelic pads roll across the chorus, which at points sounds as gentle as a melodic sigh. Sandwiched between moody beats and foggy R&B, the album's atmosphere is almost on-the-nose for an artist who calls Swedish R&B icon Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack producer Cameron McVey her parents.
There's an icy atmosphere that sets British R&B singers apart from their American peers. With the former region's leading artists like Ojerime, Jamilah Barry and Tyson, vocals are blanketed in a grainy haze, minor melodies reign supreme and beats saunter with a seductive '00s pace. It's a quality that makes the hooks of songs like "Don't Let Me Go"—where Tyson's rasp meets Albertina's slithering whispers in satisfying harmony—imprint onto the mind. Here, what's important is not what is said, but how it's sung. Knotty lines sometimes appear closer to poems than stories anchored by a clear narrative. On "Promises," for example, a slightly confusing chorus becomes a highly singable earworm with Tyson's swinging cadence. "Lovers good at making / The promises they're good at breaking, they do / When I get to thinking / I let this kinda mistake in, I do"
As sunsets morph into sunrises, metaphors of night and day capture different phases of love. Auspicious meetings in the evening lead to harsh realities or welcome revelations by morning and starry skies are likened to the feeling of helpless infatuation. On the album's B-side, the mood brightens slightly, making way for whimsical romantic affirmations on "Show Me Love," where Delilah Holiday sings "Our love will last foreveeeer." By the final song, "Can't Be Unstuck," Tyson and Coby Sey lend their seraphic falsetto over serene organ chords that would sound at home in a small church. After Sey closes "There's no other one that's awakened by belief in love," synths bleat like car horns on a busy street at 8 AM. It's easy to picture the Eastern sun's rays stretching across the windowpane.
Tracklist01. Choose Peace
02. Nothing feat. James Massiah
03. Promises
04. Above The Light
05. Gorgeous
06. Don't Let Me Go feat. Albertina
07. Show Me Love feat. Delilah Holiday
08. Can't Be Unstuck feat. Coby Sey