It took Mykki Blanco years to bloom into their present arc. After virtually a decade of placing out raucous, multi-modal hip-hop collections, the artist’s sound softened and brightened for 2021’s Damaged Hearts and Magnificence Sleep. The LP that adopted, 2022’s attractive, guest-spangled Keep Near Music, deepened Blanco’s vary even additional. Joined by the likes of Saul Williams, Ah-Mer-Ah-Su, and Anohni, Blanco luxuriated in introspection, juxtaposing playful membership romps like “Ketamine” with clear-eyed musings on queerness, Blackness, and femininity, like “Carry On” and “Your Feminism Is Not My Feminism.” Their newest launch, Postcards From Italia, options six songs recorded in the identical rush as their previous two albums, persevering with their prismatic collaboration with producer FaltyDL. Clocking in at simply 16 minutes, Postcards is gentle, lush, and streaked with intermittent melancholy. It hits like a breeze on a top-down drive alongside the Mediterranean coast.
With shiny, crisp guitars and shuffling beats, Postcards edges nearer to traditional rock’n’roll than Blanco’s ever taken us earlier than, replete with the style’s originating burst of sexual delight. Opener “Magic on My Again” layers a number of eras of rock’s historic resonance. A Bo Diddley guitar strum flowers over a wobbling bass line that instantly summons up Lou Reed’s tribute to the trans ladies of Nineteen Seventies New York, “Stroll on the Wild Facet,” itself a heat however muted rehash of Fifties rock’n’roll substances. After which, on the fore of the combo, a punchy kick-snare drum sample calls in “Wild Facet”’s 1990 reinvigoration as a pattern within the palms of A Tribe Referred to as Quest, “Can I Kick It?” All these a long time coalesce to set the stage for one in all Blanco’s most joyful, exuberant tracks to this point, a tune about intercourse so good the entire world floods with pleasure. “You do it sluggish/Can’t assist however smile,” they sing on two simultaneous vocal tracks, enjoying each the sleek, sultry backup singer and the charismatic, off-the-cuff bandleader.
Darker, extra ambivalent notes waft by the center of the EP, although the manufacturing’s sheen by no means dulls. Throughout a handful of principally bite-sized tracks, Blanco considers all of the methods individuals can fall out of synch with one another, even whereas standing within the glow of actual love. The twinkling R&B ballad “Love Fell Down Round Me” renders a breakup by exact, tactile particulars: “Your tears on blue denims/My espresso on the lounge ground.” On the hazy, psychedelic “Only a Fable,” Blanco sings about kissing a tearful white lover within the midst of the 2020 uprisings after the killing of George Floyd. “It was a fable of the town/It was a fable of the usA.,” they sing over a bounding bass line. The vignette collapses and expands its scale from 1000’s of individuals within the streets to 2 individuals in a room and again once more—intimacy huddled inside a world-historical motion, ballooning to the scale of fable.
The EP’s closing bookend “Holidays within the Solar” spikes the BPM to a membership pulse. William Eaves’ manufacturing calls again to the blunt abandon of flash-in-the-pan Eurodance acts like Haddaway and La Bouche, whose maximal sound ricocheted again to america with comedian frisson through the mid-’90s. Blanco’s pitch-shifted voice swings throughout the tune’s title in a repeatedly triggered pattern; on the verses, they curl their consonants to have an effect on a rustic drawl. Blanco has at all times approached their vocals with a beneficiant sense of play, fast to don and shed exaggerated characters on a dime, and their Eurodance persona isn’t any completely different. “I imagine in love and I imagine in going exhausting,” they proclaim over the dance ground in a hypnotic Sprechstimme. The beat throbs, incessant, main all of the free threads and fractured hearts all through the EP to candy launch.
