Samia: Honey (Grand Jury Music: 2023)
I took off the month of January from this blog, but February is here and I am back at it! The storytelling of Samia has been on my mind recently, so for this month I have decided to recommend the album of hers which has stuck with me the most: Honey.
Honey is an album written mostly in the second person and in past tense. It has the feeling of an extended reminiscence, with equal parts horror, longing, and melancholia. « How much better can anything get than sitting on your porch remembering it? », Samia asks on “To Me It Was”. Like most questions posed by the album, this one goes unanswered.
From the very first track, “Kill Her Freak Out”, Samia makes clear that she is not an entirely rational narrator, and she makes no claims to moral authority. What you get, again and again, is nothing more or less than genuine emotion filtered thru dozens of tiny scenes. You are left to grapple with the implications of her verses on your own. Most of the tracks feature a dangerous undercurrent of irony: You are made to question both her emotional response and your own standing to make such judgments. When she sings, for example, « To me, it was a good time », does this affirmation salvage the situation? Or is her acceptance part of the problem which is being portrayed?
Nowhere is this ambiguity more cutting than in “Breathing Song”—a song about sexual assault, described by the artist as “probably the least enjoyable song of all time”, which is itself simultaneously a very true and false assessment—but it is the subtle, pernicious way it penetrates songs like “Honey” that lend it its true power.
Favourite track: “To Me It Was” is potent but listenable, and optimistic even as it evokes melancholy.