Some Kinda...

Album Review

Subject went over well with R&B lovers who prefer the legacies of fully clothed '70s soul singers over, say, bare-chested Usherites. It didn't do nearly as well commercially as it deserved, peaking somewhere in the hundreds of the Billboard 200 chart and spawning only a pair of singles that didn't even skip far up the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. That hasn't affected Dwele in the least, thankfully, as Some Kinda... contains no stabs at crossing over, not a single shot at appealing to a younger audience that relates more to raging hormones and rampant hedonism. (This is an album with a guest appearance from Boney James, a white saxophone player with a fan base heavy on 40-something black women, rather than a Juelz Santana or even a Kanye West.) Some Kinda... is a little less commercial, more relaxed, and more spacious than the debut, though not short on attractive and addictive songs. Like Tweet's It's Me Again, released earlier in the year, the album has lengthy patches of slow and mid-tempo material, but they rarely risk slipping into the background. At nearly an hour in length, the album would be tighter and more immediate with some trimming, but Dwele's chops as a songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer are always in effect. He also smartly stitches the songs together with a series of thematic interludes/skits that don't annoy, just so the album doesn't come off like a bunch of songs haphazardly splashed onto a disc. Crews like Sa-Ra and Platinum Pied Pipers might be taking R&B into often-thrilling levels of doped-out abstraction, and fellow do-it-all studio rat Raphael Saadiq might be waving the flag for "tasteful soul" (despite also operating on the fringes), but Dwele is the ideal middle ground between the two camps, matching swirling, buttery productions with often-masterful songwriting. Even Mike City's work on "I Think I Love You," the song closest to resembling a conscious bid for chart action, fails to one-up the all-Dwele songs.