With a different collaborator, “Whatchamacallit” may have brought a welcome, blithe sense of fun to Ella Mai. Perversely, the most immediate song on Mai’s album is “Whatchamacallit,” a peppy two-hander with Chris Brown which essentially copied the Nic Nac-produced beat of Brown’s own “Loyal” to create a carefree-feeling bop. One of the album’s strongest tracks, the simmering relationship ultimatum “Shot Clock,” ends with a whimper, as Mai intones “Love.full of chuckles and cuddles and sometimes eye puddles,” a saccharine sentiment that should have remained stitched on the gas-station teddy bear it was lifted from.
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The album is threaded, like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope or TLC’s FanMail, with earnest interludes that riff on her full name (“E” is for emotion, “L” for lust, etc.) which can tend towards vague Hallmark-isms. Not all Mai’s efforts to open up are as successful. “Can you love me naked?” she asks, in a song that distances nudity from the context of R&B seduction and reframes it to vibe more with body positivity and mental health. The acoustic bonus closer, “Naked,” is a challenge for a lover to accept her, “resting bitch face” and all. Her words are scathing over a partner who’s “chewing with mouth wide open,” but she lays her own flaws bare, too.
The throbbing “Dangerous” transposes the conceit of the Shangri-Las’ ode to bad boy allure, “Out in the Streets,” into squelchy G-funk with double-time harmonies which cascade like heart flutters.Įlla Mai never quite scales the heights reached by her skippy single “Trip,” or the pristine “Boo’d Up.” Yet Mai’s songwriting can be deft and unexpected, refining the attitude that once led her to declare, on an early EP, “I hope the next girl you love ends up fucking you over” into more nuanced examinations of knotty relationships. Despite a few obvious reference points, Mai avoids pastiche, although a tightened tracklist would have provided focus to this over-long collection of 16 songs.Įxecutive produced by DJ Mustard, Ella Mai pays homage to ’90s commercial R&B and Mustard’s own hip-pop signatures while bringing in new sounds, from aerated beats punctuated with the sound of teeth-kissing (the Nana Rogues-produced “Good Bad”) and Majestic Casual-ready synth swashes (“Cheap Shot”). Mai’s finger-snapping, perfectly fine debut is billed as a “throwback R&B album,” with dutiful Easter eggs for the genre’s aficionados: a “no no no” reference here, a “little secret” wink there, and a “writing’s on the wall” hat-tip elsewhere. Mai has been signed to hip-pop hypeman DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers imprint since 2016, putting a decisive point of view on likeable, if not particularly individual, trap-leaning pop beats, with songs centering on agency, desire, and her early-morning appetite to receive a, kind of, breakfast in bed.
No one could have sung “Ooooh/Now I’ll never get over you” with quite the same starry-eyed naiveté that Ella Mai does on her unapologetically sprung summer smash “Boo’d Up.” It was a song that both Stevie Wonder and toddlers found easy to love, a four-minute reverie during which everything slips out of focus apart from you and your boo.
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