Khaleel Mandel’s albums take place like James Cameron films on a micro-scale. In both visionary’s respective worlds, the attention to detail is exceedingly high, strong-willed characters drive the themes forward, and romantic plots squeeze themselves into the picture, but there is a center effect you can feel directing every minute. The water tentacle communicating scene from Cameron’s 1989 feature ‘The Abyss’ was an early glance into the CGI world, supplying viewers with a new visual we hadn’t seen until that point. Throughout the ‘Titanic’ film, characters are driven into a fiery tumult, which lends fiery debates to how close one can or should, stick to historical accuracy. In these moments, you can sense the director conveying to us directly through the characters and their paths. While packed with varying ideas and opposing perspectives, Mandel’s records have a comparable sensation of these techniques at play.
Mandel’s new album, ‘Khaleel,’ doesn’t outwardly announce itself as a film like his previous effort, ‘Connecticut Chronicles’. However, this system of meshing sensations explored on this record here feels cinematic regardless, and many characters show up throughout the album’s breadth. The introduction ‘Had to Take a Chance’ turns the notion of risk and reward into an anthemic moral story. W. Cash stops by on ‘2 Geechies’; ‘On My Arm’ is where Steff Money makes an audio cameo. On ‘Stay Focused,’ The mood is tongue-in-cheek, illuminating, theatrical, witty, and a nod to the Cab Calloway big band years. Khaleel asserts, “Avoid drinking the Kool-Aid like it’s water / avoid spending time with two faces, just spend quarters,” and roars through a laundry list of niche scenarios to anticipate from life. “If she prays for a man with more dough / Don’t say I did not tell you so / Stay focused.” God emerges under the semblance of female voices on songs like the outro ‘What Are You Fighting For’ and the ninth song ‘Chameleon Ave,’ where an ethereal female voice sings, “Don’t tell lies / Pick up the bandaid now / you’re not gonna be better.”
The music itself, at the same time, emulates a lengthy line of genre-breaking developments (Nas’ illmatic, D’angelo’s Voodoo, Flying Lotus’ Until The Quiet Comes, Pharrell’s In My Mind, Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation) by kicking the boundaries of hip-hop demonstrations. There are compositions containing full band instruments on every song; standard drum kits where the snare hits on the three, multiple keyboards/piano performances, Fender bass-lines, and lead/rhythm guitars give ‘Khaleel’ a free, smooth underflow every bit as passionate and ambidextrous as the military of flows in the hands of Khaleel Mandel.
However, he’s still playing with a theme offhandedly: Just under the hood is a spiritual thread about never straying away from the core of who you were meant to be all along. As ‘Khaleel’ is the third piece to his trilogy album, the self-titled magnum opus’s concept admittedly is “Who I am.” Lyrically, Khaleel resists holding others accountable without owning his own stuff; in the gospel composed ‘Just a Little While Longer,’ he takes a look at himself: “I have to stop putting my heart on the line” and indicating not to let go of his willpower just as his blessings are coming in. Khaleel’s critiques, as they’ve done throughout his entire discography, come with influential, self-professed challenges. As he sings on ‘Motley Crew,’ “ From every corner of the earth we blend in / fun fact, that’s where I’m from / I’m from a motley crew.”
‘Not Able to Act on Our Feelings’ is a gentle and sentimental message of acceptance for knowing when twin flames are better apart than together. Khaleel is an album about small steps to life upgrades in the face of outwardly overwhelming odds. Mandel puts on a lyrical masterclass, while the significant Genius Top 100 number one lead single ‘Expect The Unexpected’ runs less like a typical jingle and more like a pulsating substance.
At a time when album releases are strictly scheduled for weekly Fridays, ‘Khaleel’ dropped worldwide on his 30th birthday, September 25th, which was a Wednesday. Khaleel has seemingly set a new pattern as more artists drop earlier in the week, almost two months after its official release.
Khaleel Mandel’s approach as a composer is derivative from the lineage of Prince, Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, and Q-Tip. He’s not trying to emulate any of the following, but he’s carrying their torch of leading with musical individuality. As this is Mandel’s seventh straight self-produced album, he aims to secure himself in the discussions of one of the greatest musicians of his generation.
Published by: Nelly Chavez
