TSHA - Flowers

November 13, 2020 - Ninja Tune

Just as I was settling down for the winter ahead, preparing my mind’s fortress for the short gray days that blur into long silent nights, TSHA’s new EP Flowers grew out of my assignment pile like those Alpine plants that seem miraculously to grow out of solid rock. Featuring collaborations with Gabrielle Alpin, Ell Murphy and the Malian Trio Da Kali, Teisha Matthews has challenged herself and expanded her sound exponentially beyond her past work, applying a masterful sensitivity to nuance in a more ambitious playground. With seemingly endless compositional depth and teeming with life, Flowers is a color study of high contrast, a personal record of peak emotional experience, and a reminder that it feels really, really good when things fit perfectly together.  

Flowers is only four tracks long, but like a tour in a foreign place with a friend who’s local, it’s a spacious journey from start to finish without losing intimacy. We start with ‘Sister,’ which engulfs you in a heady, luxurious field of auditory color. As the song unfolds, two melodic themes blossom into focus, complementary like two people walking beside each other—one takes a step, then the other. Soft and sentimental, ethereal but still danceable, this optimistic opener holds you gently like a baby and cares for you in a way you haven’t felt in a long time, if ever before. The following ‘Renegade’ then introduces an entirely different feeling, a tough hike up a tall peak to see the sky, with determined electric rock guitars placed beside Ell Murphy’s soulful vocals and mysterious jungle-ey flute riffs. The “oom-bop” bass intro is particularly yummy, and it builds up the song’s energy early from the action of a spring being pulled and released, or a rubber band being pulled and snapped. 

TSHA’s production keeps Gabrielle Alpin’s vocals front and center in ‘Change’ without losing any richness in the sound variety. At times Aplin’s voice, the song’s driving force, is unravelled, repeated, or dropped underwater, and hazey textures echo certain words for emphasis. TSHA rounds out the bottom of the track with an 80s crashing pop beat and complements the vocals with a synth line that feels like the demo song on my 90s Casio keyboard. Matthews demonstrates a command of the compositional big-picture here without getting overwhelmed by the strength of lyrics sung. Everything is perfectly balanced on the scale, and we’re treated with just the right amount of each element to appreciate the fullness of their variety. 

The EP closes with ‘Demba,’ which features the traditional Malian griots of Trio Da Kali over a bass that feels close like a jacket zipper. In a syntax like a call-and-response, TSHA drops a highly addictive dance break in a four-on-the-floor club cadence and contrasts it with the syncopated triplets of the trio’s balafon. This handling of syncopation, as I’ve gushed about before, is TSHA’s signature party trick and something that sets her apart from the work of other musicians in her circle. 

With Flowers and beyond it, TSHA remains a master of contrasting color, of light and dark, of on and off, of odd and even. Her work is exciting because it exists on the edge where two planes meet. Of course both planes are there, but you find yourself only looking at the spots where they interact. Like the laws of nature, that bequeath those places where two ecosystems meet with the vastest biological diversity, there is richness in a perfectly-timed dance of opposites or differences. Teisha Matthews has done something extraordinary by tapping into the raw power of that in between space and using it to craft a style and sound that’s all her own. ☔