A labyrinthine transition leads to the optimistic, vaguely spiritual refrain that will also close the album: “Takin’ on the light.” The production, like nearly the entire album, uses layers of keyboards with improvisational tendrils and puffy, quavery, analog-sounding tones that hark back to 1970s Stevie Wonder, particularly “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.” And Solange’s voice is sure-footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim.On nearly all of the full-length songs, Solange is credited as the sole composer and lyricist. She sings, “I saw things I imagined” more than a dozen times, repeating the line or parts of it while continuously toying with the music: different melodies, different speeds, different chords, everything in a dreamlike flux. Although the album is punctuated by spoken-word interludes — bits of poetry, self-help, comedy and tribute — it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking.The opening song, “Things I Imagined,” makes clear that Solange is offering floaters, not bangers.
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In the chromatic haze, Solange ponders questions and considers life lessons in a few ambiguous words.In “Beltway,” she sings “don’t, don’t, don’t,” pauses, and continues, “you love me” it’s impossible to tell where the couple stand. Keyboards supply rich chords that offer plenty of places to alight harmoniously the beat is often an implied pulse that can and does leave behind 4/4 convention. The song is one of the album’s closest approaches to pop-R&B, with an ingenious beat, terse melodies and abundant countermelodies the lyrics are cryptic and sunken into the mix, but at the end Solange reveals, “Sound of rain/helps me let go of the pain.” Another near-pop song is “Jerrod,” a promise of intimacy — “Give you all the depths of my wanting” — that Solange coos with the airy tenacity of Janet Jackson.For much of the album, Solange dissolves verse-chorus-verse into meditations and vamps. “The film is an exploration of origin, asking the question how much of ourselves do we bring with us versus leave behind in our evolution,” Solange said in a statement.The film visualizes “Sound of Rain” as a computer-animated extravaganza: a stadium full of dancers that turns into a garden, a burning man, people riding flying machines. At the beginning and end of the film, Solange, in a glittering dress, dances alongside a mysteriously hooded Holy Ghost, revealed at the end as a black man.
Because Houston is not her only home on this album music is. The lilt of her voice alone could have carried these few seconds of content, but she and her musicians made the effort to match the rhythm and find its song. There’s too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many …” A keyboard follows each syllable of that speech, soon joined by chords to harmonize.
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