October 7, 2022 - Ninja Tune
Teisha Matthews aka TSHA is a long-time favorite of mine. We started following her in the early days of this blog. We’ve been waiting a long time for her debut album to drop.
And when it first dropped, we missed it. Caught up in the throes of life, the turning of the Earth, the tides that ebb and flow. In our case, the tides that rock us around and toss us up into the air. Will we land on Earth or back into the sea storm? Only time tells after the fall.
Hello. How are you? I’m a little late to the party I’ll admit. Sitting here in the wet Brooklyn summer heat and the worst eczema outbreak I’ve ever had in my life all over my hands. It’s taken me a while to catch up. Some return to other is needed.
TSHA’s Capricorn Sun is a long-anticipated triumph of a debut album, an electronic dreamscape where soft joy responds to euphoric pop anthems, and the bittersweetness of life is lit up for us with a bright warm light—how it sparkles! These tracks are thoroughly modern in their approach, but something about them takes me back a decade or two or three. There’s an optimism here that today’s nihilism romances and prays to in its lostness. A fitting read for a body of work that relates overtly to identity, passing through life’s experience, and matters of the soul. TSHA’s soul, to be exact. Capricorn Sun has been described as a self-portrait, a clear definition of who Matthews is right here and right now. I find it also to be a beautifully recorded diary, crafted with freeform expression and out of both classic and unexpected materials.
The production on the album is tight, but there is still just enough rawness to it, as though we are stepping into Matthews’ personal recording studio in her home and hearing her record the compositions she keeps nearest and dearest to her heart. A myriad of textures, thoughts, ideas, colors, and materials harmonize in hot glue, a beautiful manifestation of recorded experience. Like a locket on a chain on the singer at the mic, we get a first-hand perspective of the rhythms, the reactions, and the communications that come forth in a moment. This is an effect I find rare in the dance music genre. Compositions created in digital space can so easily become overwrought and too perfect to maintain emotional weight.
TSHA maintains close intimacy with us while still giving the structure of a beat to lure us in and help us focus. She pulls the peak emotional moment out of the vocal samples she’s chosen for each song, inflection points that punctuate with their force, like a preacher’s words as a lightning strike in ‘Power.’ She folds these samples into a blissful, silky harmonious whole, a sort of dance stream of consciousness where energy flows with wild abandon and where each inflection ruminates inside of space and time and repetition over a beat. It’s like box breathing while someone yells at you with big gigantic demand. You’re able to stay objective and appreciate the beauty of the gift of their emphasis.
The album may be dance music but it has a storyteller’s wit, like how ‘Galdem’ introduces ‘The Light’ before ‘The Light’ even begins. And how there’s an impeccable balance of the light and the dark of the psyche. And how there are several lyric-heavy tracks showcasing powerful vocalists. Highlights include the minimal sentimental heartbeat of ‘The Light,’ the soaring ‘OnlyL’ featuring dance music duo NIMMO, the heady, luxurious field of auditory color in ‘Sister,’ and sparkling ‘Water’ that fills your head with the vocals of Malian griot Oumou Sangaré, fragmented in synths and then expanded in dazzling sunlight. Energy bubbling up from below and down from above all at once, no way to tell which way is up.
With Capricorn Sun, TSHA continues applying a masterful sensitivity to the nuance of her life in an ambitious musical playground, and this time it’s an environment with heavier objects to balance during the act of play. ☔