Rhye: Woman (2013)

(Republic)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It's derivative. Rhye doesn't do much creatively that Sade (to whom singer Michael Milosh's voice is strikingly reminiscent) or even the xx haven't already. It's a couple of dudes aping the classic soul music they like in minimalist layers of keyboard and a general vibe of calm sensuality, encompassing even its Herb Ritts-like album cover. But it is tremendously well-crafted, and beguilingly sexy enough that if you happen to be two hours away from your primary romantic partner it's... well, let's not go into that. But turn your lights down, hold somebody close, let this play on a good or at least decent system. (Not your laptop speakers.) It's low-key but only in the most superficial manner; the hooks are constant and you will notice that regardless, but Woman's subtleties and grinding undercurrent are too rich to come across on, say, an iPod dock.

This is R&B with a specific kind of closed-off beauty; the space and emptiness in the recording is as important as the noise made, the songs performed. "Open" is immediately disarming with its rush of strings, horns, synths, and that simultaneously familiar and alien voice of Milosh, laid against Robin Hannibal's beautiful arrangement. The record feels instantly comfortable, an organic romance, but also like it's stretching, malleable, new. It's a love letter to a great deal of music that came before it, no doubt, and it is conscious of its effortless cool: something like the airy but uncompromised funk of "Last Dance" is improbably stylish. But there is tension in it -- real longing, real desire -- and these are things that never grow old or stale, in or outside of the pop idiom.

Some of that tension comes from the hushed but not ghostly nature of the music -- it's more dynamic than quiet per se -- but a lot more is in the genuinely erotic androgyny in Milosh's performance, which has some deep-voiced grit running underneath it but is mostly notable for rendering gender all but irrelevant. Few if any of the lyrics come across differently with knowledge or lack thereof that he is male. The point being that it doesn't matter, and almost hasn't since "Don't Worry Baby": the silkiness and vulnerability are the story here more than any notion of gender identity. Maybe it isn't progressive exactly, but there's something telling in it.

So at its sexiest -- the piano and bass rumble "The Fall," the nocturnal city music of "Shed Some Blood" -- Woman is a treasure for privacy, intimacy, ideas it's about explicitly as much as it evokes them musically. "Make love to me one more time" could seem an emptily generic command in some contexts, but not here -- the same for the whole of "3 Days," a mirrorball slowdance masterpiece about not having much time and just what some good ways are to fill that time. It doesn't wink or cheapen its sexual content, even if some of the phrasing in Milosh's lyrics is awkward -- and not, crucially, because it documents "romantic sex" or any such thing. It has considerable dignity with regard to the grace of sexuality in and of itself, and the bond it illustrates between people apart from anything that goes on beyond the closed (or open) door.

Nonetheless, Rhye is an incredibly romantic band, which says something for the varied utility of their music. Their vision of people in love has an urgency about it; minimal and soothing though "Verse" is, it sears with the sumptuous beauty of its "ain't got a second to waste" hook. And closeness -- and fucking, let's be real -- in and of themselves are as likely purely romantic as purely sexual. Either way, Woman is a pure and uncorrupted creation, as singular, personal, unbent by head-shaking outside forces as a loving or kinky or loving and kinky relationship ought to be.

The group achieves this through astonishing restraint, especially on Hannibal's part. How he crowds his mixes with so many varied noises and ideas but still makes them so delicately pretty is mysterious, and masterly. The songs themselves (and the album as a whole) score as well with their brevity -- they're short enough to be slim and precise but long enough for the listener to get thoroughly lost in them. A couple, like "One of Those Summer Days," are so wispy, quick and peaceful as to feel almost nonexistent. It's not about anything except a single moment, a tone poem of sorts, but Rhye makes it somehow stirring and dramatic.

Woman's essence is that it's a celebration. It may never burst out of its concentrated, compressed, soft-rock groove until the Tom Tom Club-like "Hunger," track nine of ten, and even it is soft and pulsating save its fevered horns. But it remains a life-affirming paean to the actual pleasures of adulthood, mostly shared but shared quietly. This might not sound like dance music to you at certain points in your life. At others, you'd fucking better believe it will.