Almeda Is The Best Song Of 2019. Here's Why
With her centerpiece track from When I Get Home, Solange captures the ethereal celebration of identity and origin, as well as its tactile expression
Tristan Young @talltristan
There were some contenders for sure. Perhaps this bizarre and increasingly Orwellian decade finally ending has invigorated a higher degree of introspection and moral reckoning than usual. Or it could be with each passing year the boldness of progressive expression and proselytizing has grown more pronounced- and necessary. After all this was the year Holly Herndon turned the existential finality of climate change into an alt techno banger. Stella Donnelly made an anthem of fighting back, in specifically threatening terms, against sexual predation. Nilüfer Yanya took a harrowing and dramatic peak into the volatile struggle of searching for mental health. 2019 was a year where the defining cultural and global issues of our time spliced with messy internal needs more than ever in music. And yet that intrinsic yearning to connect with the medium on a singularly personal level has, and will always persist. That’s where Almeda comes in. That’s why it’s the best song of the year.
Solange has spent the better part of this decade, and made the decade better for it, articulating the synthesis between the personal and the communal; how ideas that communicate her own identity relate to the notion of shared identity. These identities manifest in her black culture, in being a citizen of a country traumatized but not yet ready to reckon with trauma’s of its own making, in being a member of a familial unit seeking unity and clarity; it goes on like this. In 2016 her seminal offering Cranes In The Sky married her own grief from the fundamental struggles of being a person of color in America, with the literal gaping holes pocking the physical surface of the nation. In both cases, Solange lamented the manner in which these holes, in her home and her heart, were crudely covered up. Within that song and the surrounding collection that made A Seat At The Table, Solange wanted to highlight the struggle, and its validity, to reach a mental and emotional state of cathartic pride from ones place in the world.
With When I Get Home, Solange is vastly more confident in that position, and thus emboldened to get more exploratory, more idiosyncratic, and lean further into the roots of her heritage without trepidation. The linear, soulful agony and joy of her previous work is supplanted by fascinating vignettes of ephemeral ideas, instrumental epiphanies, and loosely anecdotal musical expressions. The experience plays out less like a conventional album than a think piece, scattered as our thoughts are meant to be, on her home of Huston and how it’s legacy has shaped hers. The manifestations of these ideas are communicated in literal and imagined terms. Huston is transformed from a town encasing her memories and dreams, into a landscape of impossible configurations and places. If her identity is complex, and that of the community from which it was birthed, then so too will she render her home.
Almeda is a brilliant expression of this idea, and good lord is it ever expressive. What begins with a brief interlude- seemingly an old recording of her goofing around, followed by a more mature voice intoning, “do nothing without intention”, morphs into an intoxicating mixture of rattling snare and murky, warbling synth. The rapid-fire seismic feed back of the percussion intimating a fidgety energy is gorgeously tempered by confident yet somehow still highly stimulating synth pads. The initially nebulous and winding key board trails and tangents recall the humidity of an oddly lit night from a distant past while the bleeding edge clarity of the percussion conveys something future perfect. Eras of musical trends defined by the culture and artistry of black America collapse into one sequence, illuminated by the pressure cooker of ideas, yet released of all baggage and tension- flowing freely and joyously, albeit with a healthy does of strutting peculiarity.
One is offered little time to ponder this (multiple listenings are not only rewarded, they are expected of you), before it becomes apparent that, also, this track is a banger. Solange does not build up her commanding vocals to a point of dominance but rather simply starts that way. “Pour my drink, sip sip”, she seductively begins in a manner that is equal parts oddly celebratory and starkly authoritative. This is no pensive and mournful expression of her psyche, which was so achingly gorgeous in A Seat At The Table; this is bombastic oration. This is a campaign speech. It should be. With a rhythmic confidence that is as assertive as it is so fucking hypotonic, Solange digs into the thematic centerpiece of When I Get Home. After a nod to other forms of cultural identity that have had similarly persecuted experiences, she distils the essence of her culture into a gorgeously pronounced stream of conscious, “Black skin, black braids, black waves, black days, black baes, black things”. If there was any wondering as to where she was going with this, Solange concludes her thought with just about the very best line of 2019, in terms of context and delivery, “Black faith still can’t be washed away/ not even in that Florida water/ not even in that Florida water”. Pay close attention to the emphatic force the of the key boards as they strike with perfect syncopated timing as she enunciates certain nouns in her laundry list and the totality of the vision in Almeda reveals itself.
As a strange cocktail of incongruous responses, ranging from excitement to discomfort (depending on your own background) is elicited, one becomes ascendant above all others- wonder. The melodic structure segues into a gorgeous and cozy keyboard scale dripping in nostalgia and comfort, followed by the song splitting into a wilderness of tangents before fading away. Almeda gives you just enough the goods, that being a melodic and lyrical masterpiece, before it pulls the rug from under you, revealing just a peak at something far more vast and unknowable. To us at least, but not to Solange. This is her story and her history, a torrent of pieces that only fit together from her perspective. However for a few brief moments in Almeda, we can see what Solange sees. That’s the point. If there’s one thing we are going to need heading into the next decade it’s the perspective and stories of as wide a spectrum of people as possible. Solange’s ode to her hometown is a vital inclusion, worth at the very least our own interpretations, wherever those may lead us. To paraphrase another 2019 triumph of examining and interrogating the history of black culture, if you don’t like her story, write your own.