Woman

**_Woman_, the debut LP from the L.A-based duo Rhye, is the musical love-child of two gold mines of creativity: Robin Hannibal of Danish electronic outfit Quadron, and Mike Milosh, Canadian producer and vocalist. Hannibal and Milosh, both massively innovative in the electronic genre individually, really find their voice, as it were, in this marriage of creative minds.**

Difficult to classify according to genre, _Woman_ is an understated but adventurous project, unafraid of experimentation. ‘The Fall’, ‘3 Days’ and ‘Last Dance’ lightly skim the thresholds of funk and disco, while the **Beach House**-esque synths of the title track sees the record roaming into dream-pop territory. The velvet smoothness of Milosh’s voice reverberates wholesomely throughout, capturing some of the soulful androgyny of ’90s R&B icons such as **Sade** and **Toni Braxton**. In fact, it is difficult to listen to _Woman_ without being immediately drawn to Milosh’s arresting countertenor vocals, which hold this dexterous project intact.

Cutting through an ambient orchestra of horns, strings and synths, its constancy preserves the album’s serene integrity in what is otherwise a stylistic myriadic. In the context of limited biographical information about **Rhye**, this euphonic voice has hoodwinked many ears into envisioning a female vocalist, which perhaps destabilises how we understand the eponymous “Woman” of the album’s title, as discerning the gender dynamics of the album can often be a complicated task.

If you couldn’t tell already from the album artwork, _Woman_ is pre-occupied with the physicality of love. Refreshingly, however, **Rhye** manage to avoid the heavy handed sexuality to which the R&B genre can oftentimes fall foul. The intimacy of its lyrical content (first track ‘Open’ features Milosh crooning soulfully “I’m a fool for that shake in your thighs”) is offset by a concerted effort from the duo to remain out of the spotlight. The sentiment that seems to have emerged from the limited publicity that **Rhye** have received is that Milosh and Hannibal savour anonymity, favouring a greyscale shot of a naked neck for the LP cover, and refusing to indulge the media with an explanation of the choice of “Rhye” as a name.

The only real weakness of this otherwise fantastic album falls in its latter third, where a couple of more instrumentally minimalist tracks (‘One of Those Summer Days’ / ‘Major Minor Love’) marks a definite lag in momentum. Moreover, although the final track (‘Woman’) is an impressive feat in its own right, amassing two minutes and forty anaphoric seconds of one lyric (which still somehow manages to avoid monotony), its abrupt ending is not quite the cadence that the album as a whole needs or deserves, even if it does befit the fragmentary nature of the individual song.

On the whole, **Rhye**’s first endeavour is a beautiful, symphonic concoction with a deeply expansive vision: to blur distinctions of genre and gender, and to hold as many paradoxes as possible in delicate tension. Despite condensing so much soul and honesty into one LP, **Rhye** remains an extremely mysterious, faceless entity, shirking media hype and defying the vocabulary of genre to possibly pigeonhole the group. I suppose that this is precisely the quality that makes _Woman_ such an accessible and pleasurable record to listen to. It continually frees itself of any standardised set of associations, but instead foregrounds the material value of music itself, and in this sense, captures an elusive spirit that modern pop music is prone to miss.

**Similar To:** Sade, Chromatics

**MP3:** ‘Open’, ‘3 Days’