Album Review: Sister Crayon - Devoted

So, in being honest, when I listened to the 30 second previous of “Armor” in the iTunes store, after it was announced that Sister Crayon was back, and had a new album in the immediate future—I will admit that I was worried. It didn’t sound like either of their previous efforts—their stunning, somewhat reserved debut, Bellow, or the phenomenal follow up EP from 2013, Cynic.

It took watching a live performance of the song in the official music video, as well as listening to the rest of Devoted a number of times for the song itself to sink in—how it works as a single, why it works as a single, and where it fits within the rest of the context of an impressive, mature sophomore album.

Even with numerous live incarnations over the last five years, Sister Crayon has always been the work of the core duo—vocalist Terra Lopez and multi-instrumentalist Dani Fernandez. While they toyed with live instruments (most notably percussion) on both of their previous efforts, here they focus primarily drum machines, sampling and intricate synthesizer work, creating a record that is both slick, mechanical, cold and technical, yet warm, emotionally charged, thought provoking and surprisingly human.

Throughout the course of Devoted’s 10 tracks, Lopez bases many of her lyrics around repetition of phrases, creating a hypnotic mantra in nearly all of them—like the impassioned “Baby girl told me to own that shit,” in “Armor”; the solemn “I could never, never be your girl,” in “Your Girl” or the “You know I’ve never been good,” in “Night Totem”; and the desperate anger in the closing track “Hell in My Head”—“No one’s gonna fuck up my way, no one’s gonna fuck up my way now.”

This technique works in two ways—the first is to create catchy hooks that remains with you long after you’ve finished listening to the record; the second is to reveal the truth and emotion poured into each of the songs. Closing your album with a song including the repeated lyric “No one’s gonna fuck up my way now,” is normally not something you do just because it sounds good on the tape. It’s done for a reason—it’s done to prove a point, or to get something across.

Sister Crayon’s strength has always been Lopez’s songwriting and lyrics. She’s brutally confessional—something she’s been right out of the gate on their debut, and she’s only grown more confident in the interim. Cynic’s lyrics were incredibly honest and blunt. On Devoted, she’s still honest, and still confessional, but the lyrics are more mysterious at times, or at least dressed up in slightly more metaphor.

On their Facebook page, the band lists its influences as “Jeff Buckley, single mothers, and absent fathers”—the latter two were huge themes on Cynic. On Devoted, however, Lopez turns the focus inward—in a sense, it’s a record about love, but not a record full of long songs, if that makes sense. It’s about lust and passion, longing, loneliness, confusion, anger, and the difficulties that come along with giving your heart to someone else— “How strange it is to love,” Lopez states plainly on the opening and frenetic “Amor”; later, on the equally as breakneck “Bicep” she is torn: “I’m ready for this love, I’m not ready for this love.”

Sister Crayon have always blurred genres and styles—combining electronica, R&B, and hip-hop influences into a sound that was all together original. Similarly to last year’s magnificent What is This Heart?  from How to Dress Well, which was best described as “a pop record for adults,” Devoted plays up the hip-hop and R&B leanings in Lopez’s lyrics and delivery, but musically, it’s brainy enough not to allow itself to be pigeonholed into one specific area. A realization that I had while listening to it for maybe the fourth of fifth time through was that it’s a post-R&B or even a post-trip hop record. It propels, it rattles, it slithers and slinks, and it slows itself down when a real impact needs to be made.

From start to finish, Devoted is an accomplishment, but it’s in its final two tracks—the somber, haunted “To Show You Violence” and the aforementioned “Hell in My Head” that are, by far, the album’s best material. It’s a one-two punch that you’re not ready for—the album itself boasts clean and big production values, a much larger sound when compared to Bellow; but Lopez and Fernandez keep the energy levels pretty high throughout the record’s first eight tracks. “To Show You Violence” slows things down to a codeine drip—thickly delayed, dreamy guitar work, slow motion percussion that echoes in the ether, and Lopez’s melancholic cooing all come together to remind you that “alternative R&B” is still a genre that works when all the pieces fall into place.

“Hell in My Head” is the kind of song that could only be a closing track—a coda of sorts to the album. It’s minimalistic in music, allowing the strength of the lyrics to overpower. “I think about it all and what was lost. I think about it all and what we had,” Lopez sings, revealing to the listeners that this love that is talked about throughout Devoted doesn’t have a happy ending.

Sister Crayon is the kind of band that continues to grow with each album, and continue to make definitive, artistic statements. As songwriters and musicians, Lopez and Fernandez continue to become more confident in their abilities. Devoted is, without a doubt, one of the best records of 2015; smart and compelling pop music that isn’t afraid to step out of the light and into the darkness.

Devoted  is out on June 2nd digitally, with a promise of physical formats "soon."