Kelis: Kaleidoscope : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

What's arresting about the single "Caught Out There" isn't just the already infamous chorus, "I hate you so much right now"; it's the arrangement's take on love gone bad - the plummeting pinging effects somewhere between a video game and sirens responding to a criminal incident. What's more, Kelis, a Harlem-born twenty-year-old, is too musically adventurous and emotionally ambivalent to employ any one attitude. Plumbing retro styles is the easy resort of the hip-hop eclecticist, but somehow Kelis' background in jazz, gospel, rock and R&B brings a deeply felt sonic futurism to her debut album, Kaleidoscope. The modern love parable "Game Show" uses early-jazz piano chords, and "No Turning Back" has a Seventies-soul feel, but then Kelis plays the space chanteuse with the free-floating "Suspended." Even when her metaphors reach, no one can accuse her of unoriginality - "Mafia" equates lovers' trust with the mob's code of silence, using an insinuating arabesque melody that the singer's whiplike voice follows effortlessly. The ultrahip production duo the Neptunes makes this interplanetary power-girl mix sound both danceably down-to-earth and shockingly new. (RS 834)

ARION BERGER