Maya Jane Coles - Take Flight (2017)

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Maya Jane Coles - Take Flight (2017)

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The first major release in three years from British DJ and producer Maya Jane Coles—once sampled by Nicki Minaj—is a moody two-hour collection that highlights her weaknesses.

Maya Jane Coles’ breakthrough came down to a single sound: a bright, bouncy organ bassline that gave her 2010 hit “What They Say” its luminous energy. It was hardly an original sound—in fact, it dominated overground house music in the 1990s via hits like Robin S’ “Show Me Love” and Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams”—but the British producer’s tune made good use of its shivering, octave-spanning frequencies. (So good, in fact, that Nicki Minaj sampled the tune on 2014’s “Truffle Butter.”) Coles’ 2012 DJ-Kicks mix, with its blend of deep house, post-dubstep, and pop melodies, also positioned her as a DJ right at the crux of the zeitgeist. But none of her subsequent output has had quite the same sense of immediacy. Her debut album, 2013’s Comfort, lacked a strong identity, and her 2014 Fabric mix was pleasant but hardly visionary. Coles remains an in-demand DJ—she played Coachella this past spring, and her calendar is peppered with summer dates in Ibiza—but she hasn’t put out a major release since 2014. Three years is a long time in dance music; perhaps to make up for her extended absence, she marks her return to the studio with a 24-track album that runs nearly two hours. Unfortunately, the wider canvas only serves to highlight her weaknesses as a producer.

Coles has always had a predilection for dusky hues and soft-to-the-touch textures, and she sticks with the same palette here. For basslines, she takes the glowering low end of drum ‘n’ bass and smears it like charcoal. Her drums are a mix of skipping house grooves and chopped-up breakbeats. For tone color, she favors swirly synth pads and clean-toned guitar lines reminiscent of the xx, and she fills in the rest with either her own breathy vocals or those of guest singers who sound remarkably like her. Listeners who can’t get enough of these sorts of sounds are in luck, because Take Flight never departs from Coles’ formula. But what at first might seem agreeably moody becomes stultifying after a few tracks. The limitations of her approach are apparent in the fact that she uses the same breathy tone and vaguely downcast melodies whether she’s singing about sexual desire (“Weak”) or depression (“Blackout”)—a risk-averse strategy that sells short her music’s emotional potential.

There are some interesting sounds bubbling under the surface. The filtered bass of “Weak” casts a glance back at Depeche Mode; “Old Jam” pairs a sanded-down sax bleat with a bass tone that quivers like a beam of light in deep water. Just as often, though, her sounds feel arbitrary and generic, as though she’d started out with presets and forgotten to replace them with something better. And her tendency to keep piling on synths and reverb means that the most distinctive sounds still get lost in an undifferentiated beige mush.

Even at a comparatively short four or five minutes long, individual tracks are a slog. In song after song, Coles opts for the same kinds of four-bar chord progressions, which chug gamely away from start to finish. This kind of linear progression makes sense for DJs, but in an album geared at home listening, the mind craves some kind of variety: the flip from verse to chorus and back again, the unexpected detour of a well-placed bridge. Here, once you’ve heard the first 16 bars of a given track, you know exactly what it’s going to do.

The only thing that varies much is tempo. In this, Coles covers an admirable range. There are a half-dozen tracks of slow-burning trip-hop, and another handful of cuts are slow-motion house, somewhere between 100 and 110 beats per minute. Nine or 10 songs follow the textbook stomp and skip of classic deep house, and “Let You Go,” the fastest thing here, reprises the ambient dubstep of Coles’ Nocturnal Sunshine project. Instead of dividing the album into a house-tempo disc and a downtempo disc, Coles alternates between the two modes. But after five or six tracks, the strategy becomes as predictable as her by-the-book chord progressions; the fast/slow/fast/slow sequencing kills any kind of momentum the album might otherwise have achieved.

Take Flight isn’t without its pleasures. “Werk” is a lovely deep-house tune propelled by a skipping hint of UK garage. Its lilting vocal strip faintly echoes Blaze’s classic “Lovelee Dae,” and its pointillist arrangement—a daub of sax here, a pinprick of synth there—benefits from the everything-in-its-right-place sense of cohesion that her songs too often lack. It goes without saying that Coles needs to learn to edit, but more than that, she needs to rediscover the sense of focus that distinguished her best work in the first place. As “What They Say” proved, sometimes going back to basics is the best way forward.