Wait ‘Til Night

When I first met singer/producer Melissa “Cooly G” Campbell in 2009 I suggested to her that her early work shared a certain trippy, saucy character with early Chris & Cosey. It was outside her frame of reference, and I don’t know if she ever got round to listening to any, but on her 2014 second album it’s truer than ever. On this record, she’s shed most of the house influences that shot through her first releases: instead it’s more or less R&B — but R&B constructed with the raw synth and drum machine tones of early electropop. It’s also an overwhelmingly sexual record — but it’s specifically about fantasy, yearning, imagining, amplified to the point of being hallucinatory.