Cooly G - Playin Me
- Written by Greg Salter
Some of the finest records seem to occupy their own space – completely self-contained and of their own world, they’re not insular so much as all-encompassing, and they’re often albums that people fall for heavily. Over the last decade or so, Hyperdub have released a number of records like this – think of Burial’s Untrue, Kode 9 and the Spaceape’s Memories Of The Future, Darkstar’s North to name just a few. With the release of Cooly G’s debut LP, Playin Me, the label have put out another album that hauls you into its own world, from the distorted, pulsating guitar line that opens first track ‘He Said I Said’, which stutters like a nervous heartbeat beneath Cooly G’s anticipatory lyrics: “Sitting here across the room from you/Thinking ‘bout what we gonna do”.
‘He Said I Said’ may well be one of the year’s finest album openers and certainly sets the tone for what’s about to follow over the next 51 minutes. There’s sex, love, but also breakdowns and hurt – it’s striking how Playin Me manages to sound both sensual and heartbroken, often all at once with these feelings spread out and bleeding into each across Cooly G’s lush, grimey tracks. On ‘Sunshine’, she sounds breathless with both infatuation and loss over a muted reggae lilt and skittering beats; on ‘Come Into My Room’ she whispers and croons come ons that sound as mournful as they do sexy over a beautifully deconstructed backdrop of synthetic rave strings and house keys.
This ability to bring together a whole heap of elements from a wide range of genres in her music is one of Cooly G’s strengths and makes Playin Me so listenable, rich and deep. The title track is built around the kind of synths that might have given early UK funky or UKG tracks a cheap, party sheen, but here, over pulsing jungle and dubstep rhythms they sound unsettling, nervy, as if the music from a club is still echoing in your head hours after you’ve got home. Halfway through, it erupts, tired, pissed off and angry. ‘What This World Needs Now’ proves that there’s still some depth and emotion to be eased out of the wobble genre, with Cooly’s vocals bringing back the kind of early ‘90s soul and dignity to club tracks that only Katy B is doing elsewhere at the moment.
Increasingly, as the album develops, vocal-heavy tracks give way to instrumentals, but the moods and memories of the first half of the album remain. On ‘Trying’, synths bloom and fade over the top of each other beautifully as sub bass rumbles below – all Cooly needs to do in terms of vocals is loop a line about crying and trying through the mix to underline the feeling she's already constructed. Later tracks move towards a sound somewhere between dub and house, allowing her to focus less on song structure and more on developing and exploring a mood – the beats on ‘What Airtime’ give a sense of paranoia, echoing over an occasionally empty backdrop, while ‘Is It Gone’ mourns the end of something, with fractured noise falling into a dubby rumination that turns over on itself, all sleepless and itchy.
Playin Me is an astonishing example of how to combine personal emotion with the forms and textures of such a broad history of dance music. It’s patient and focused, so caught up in capturing the spaces that Cooly is singing about – the landscapes, rooms, headspaces – that it can’t help but impose on and take over your own. Producers currently shooting for the big rooms, the crossover hits, the huge, boringly inevitable drops might want to take note of the subtle power of Cooly G’s Playin Me.