Review: Macy Gray - The Way
By Marc Blanc, Contributor
[Kobalt/Happy Mel Boopy Touring Co; 2014]
Rating: 7/10
Key Tracks: “I Miss the Sex,” “The Way”
Macy Gray began as an underdog in pop music when she was born in Canton, Ohio, the drowsy spouse of Akron. She didn’t release anything until age 30, took a brief reign as queen of R&B, then stepped away from the charts without ever completely leaving. Her legacy among younger Millennials may be as the voice of the As Told By Ginger theme song. A decade after the end of Ginger, Gray is on a label smaller than most indie rock startups.
Created by Gray due to perpetually declining sales since her 1999 debut, Happy Mel Boopy is too young and weak to even have an independent website, but still released The Way’s three singles--U.K-based Kobalt Music is putting out the entire record. Artistically, Happy Mel Boopy could be the best thing for the waning Ohio native.
Her new LP, although guilty of a few predictable pop songs, presents an artist rarely allowed in contemporary R&B: one who competes with a talented live band by pushing her own vocals to unconventional rhythmic heights, refusing to fall into any manufactured role.
Like a spoken word artist, Gray jumps into spondaic hexameter on the bridge of “I Miss the Sex” as her rhythm section falls back on a century-turning blues bassline. Rasping nearly in a whisper, she displays a clouded psychology: “Remember / He’s a hater / All the bullshit / That he do / …But I miss the sex.”
Though soaked in Gray’s isolation, “I Miss the Sex” is audacious in defying gender expectation to fixate on the physical aspect of a relationship. Mainly based on defiance of genre and gender convention, The Way maintains a resilient female voice throughout its tale of love lost.
“Bang Bang” explains the kind of sex Gray has reason to miss, climaxing in a dirty guitar solo a la Dan Auerbach, only to fade into the gleefully childish “Hands.” A shallow filler on its own, but “Hands” represents one of the most impressive aspects of The Way as a whole: its refusal to leave any of love’s emotional extreme unaddressed. From lust to cupcakey desire, then to cold abandonment, Gray bravely owns every possible sensation in this breakup diary.
Healing begins with the title track, which is also the best song and salient point of the album. A trumpet crying to years of African American and female struggle dissolves beautifully into the refrain.
“So happy and successful / Maybe I could be that way / If only I knew the way.” Perhaps modest sales wrought Gray a more vulnerable artist, but the idea that a platinum vocalist is still pursuing happiness boldly shows that fame does not equal fulfillment.
Gray is a relative recluse--finding her anywhere besides standard social networks takes time--but her latest album provides a better window into the life and times of a star from Canton than any interview could. She writes as if she still lives in that Rust Belt city, with all the humility and resilient optimism with which it raises its largely working class natives. Never apologizing for her subject matter or daring integration of violins, trumpets and rock ‘n’ roll, Gray has labored a pop R&B album with its own powerful identity.
