“The Real Meladee” Releases Birkin

For the last couple of months, The Real Meladee has been making some of the coolest grooves in the rap underground, and this autumn she’s releasing her most searing stuff to date in “Birkin,” a powerful hip-hop exhibition that espouses the firmness of its composer better than anything else she’s ever cut from inside the studio before.

Right from the jump, the minimalist melodicism wraps around the audience and demands a physical reaction out of us as well as a mental one, and though this track is hardly a drill-tinged mind-bender in the style of the new hard rap movement that has been taking the mainstream by storm lately, it’s undeniably one of the more intricately designed and provocatively muscular club jams you’ll hear all year long.

When it comes to making a larger-than-life melody come alive in a short and sweet single, The Real Meladee has a way of constantly making her brand of indie rap distinguishable from pretty much everyone else in the current Miami scene as well as abroad. While avoiding the pitfalls associated with compositional overindulgence, she certainly doesn’t hold anything back from us on the instrumental side of the song in “Birkin,” and I think there’s a case to be made for this being her most balanced release so far – at least in terms of the relationship between the lyrics and the music. The boldly crafted bassline gives the words all of the context that they need to penetrate our hearts and leave a lasting impression, and that’s not something that can be said for the majority of similarly stylized singles that I’ve heard this month.

The bass parts here are warm and practically the polar opposite of what we get from the stone-cold beats that they dance around in the intro as well as the chorus. It’s really rare for me to say as much, but “Birkin” presents us with an exceptional situation with its dark melodies, which are surprisingly organic and even-keeled in the grander scheme of things in the track. They don’t sound robotic, forced, or artificial in their tonality; on the contrary, they complement the natural timbre of Meladee’s voice and contribute to the narrative of the song with their patented variety of boastful emotions.

The Real Meladee has done a lot of amazing things since first coming to the attention of critics in the Southeast and around the world this year, and from where I sit, it sure doesn’t appear that her momentum is going to be slowing down anytime soon. “Birkin” sees the rapper getting in touch with her inner experimentalist and bending previously straight and narrow elements within her music to get as surreal a result as she can while staying true to the hook-focused mainstream framework that made her early releases sleeper hits. Hers is a sound that is hard to get out of your head once you’ve been exposed to it, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of its grandeur and attitude in the future.

Mindy McCall