Although they share the same affinity for jerky, halting time signatures as Dirty Projectors, Shapes and Sizes feel more committed and genuine in their stylistic experiments. Still, Candle To Your Eye is easily Shapes and Sizes strongest album yet, and its flaws make it no less appealing. If you’re thinking this, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.) You might also be thinking that this is nothing more than P.C. (Now, you might be thinking that I’m stretching here, making apologies for the shortcomings of hip-hop while searching for impertinent criticisms of Shapes and Sizes. Thompson-Hannant coos her come-ons, mumbling about “What’s really going on underneath your pants/ You’re a fox down there.” Her admirably direct lyrics and their delivery - far too mannered to work in this context - are reminiscent of enjoyably clunky rap metaphors, but lacking rap’s thrilling linguistic inventions. “The Hit Parade” - a spare, terse slow jam whose minimalist groove brings Thank Me Later and 808s and Heartbreak to mind - never takes off, largely due to the awkward lyrics at the song’s forefront. “Old World” isn’t the only song marred by unfortunate associations. But this fusion carries a heavy historical weight, one that has strained the legacies of Elvis, Page and Plant, and many other Caucasian cultural borrowers. Shapes and Sizes have bound together two disparate genres, fusing them together more successfully than many groups that came before them. “Bind us/ Break us,” she portends, right as the song and the album conclude. “If I die/ And my soul go down,” Thompson-Hannant repeats seven times, her voice reaching increasingly higher, until she breaks into an impressive gospel melody. At the end of “Old World” - one of Candle To Your Eye’s strongest songs - Shapes and Sizes break, unexpectedly, into a faux-spiritual. When her attempts succeed, as on sultry standout “Too Late For Dancing,” they satisfy unanticipated appetites in the less successful - and, at times, distasteful - hybridized moments, the embedded racial politics of these vocal choices prove somewhat troubling. These efforts are equal parts awkward and endearing. Although she lacks the fluid dynamics of Houston, Mariah Carey, or any other R&B virtuosas, her limitations never prevent her from straining to match their inflections, vocal acrobatics, and melismatic variations. Only a deaf person would confuse Caila Thompson-Hannant, Shapes and Sizes’ de facto lead singer, for Whitney Houston. The willingness to experiment is a characteristic common to the Asthmatic Kitty roster, but I don’t think anyone was anticipating this particular stylistic shift.ĭespite the egregious influences, Candle To Your Eye is an incredibly white-sounding album. And now another example of this burgeoning trend can be added to the tally: Candles To Your Eye, the newest album from British Columbia’s Shapes and Sizes, is positively teeming with nods to rhythm and blues. retrofitting Vampire Weekend into pop-rap. In the time since that Twitter update, there have been uncounted instances of cross-pollination between the indie and urban (to use a terribly connoted term) realms, from Kid Cudi jumping on LCD Soundsystem tracks, to Vampire Weekend using Auto-Tune on their sophomore record, to B.O.B. Whereas Dirty Projectors aimed to bridge the cultural and musical gaps between indie rock and R&B, Solange actually succeeded, thanks in part to this clever bit of re-appropriation. Dre and Erykah Badu on “XXplosive” and “Bag Lady,” respectively), linking it to a long-running R&B tradition. Her adaptation was superior to the original in almost every conceivable way: Knowles’ vocals were less studied and more limber than Angel and Amber’s from Dirty Projectors, and the cover version sampled “Bumpy’s Lament” (the same song utilized by Dr. Last November, Solange Knowles posted a cover of Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move” to her Twitter account.