Waiting to Exhale: Taja Sevelle, Toys of Vanity

March 21st, 2008

Even though I’ve been a major Prince fan since I first heard 1999 when I was but wee, and despite the fact that I have been a major funk/disco/dance-music fan forever, I never heard of Taja Sevelle until I first saw the video for “I & I,” the lead single from her 1997 album, Toys of Vanity.

The video for “I & I” was a strange, frequently eerie mixture of paranoid, schizophrenic imagery that nonetheless had a soft and very sensual aspect that matched not only the sound of the song it was meant to illustrate but also the sound of the entire Toys of Vanity album. In the video, Taja Sevelle looks like a sexy little waif version of Suzanne Vega, and the lyrics to “I & I” have a certain Vega-esque poetry and introspective quality as well—but Taja Sevelle’s songwriting is a good bit…weirder than Vega, and her sound is entirely her own: a mixture of trip-hop and straightforward R&B that fits her lyrical content very well.

So who would’ve ever thought that she was discovered by Prince in the late ’80s and became known for the major danceclub hit “Love Is Contagious”?

“Love is Contagious” is a great dance song, with a very obvious Prince/Sheila-E kind of feel to it—but, honestly, it’s quite generic: it sounds like virtually every other dance hit of the late ’80s (anything and everything by Expose comes immediately to mind), and in the video, Taja Sevelle looks almost exactly like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (a painfully obvious allusion). Sevelle’s first and second albums contained music all of this nature: good, very listenable, but ultimately unexceptional ’80s dance and early-’90s funk/R&B (very much in the style of Bel Biv DeVoe and Cameo) that never really give her a chance to really use her voice to its fullest potential.

Sevelle really hits her stride with Toys of Vanity in 1997, however. Ten years after her big breakthrough hit, Sevelle finally puts forth an album that is entirely hers, in which the music and the lyrics and her soulful voice all come together into a seamless whole. The album is usually described as R&B and appears in that section of the record stores, but this is 100% a trip-hop album, full of slinky downtempo beats, booming basslines, cold silky synths, and fuzzy guitars. It sounds a lot like a combination of Morcheeba and Suzanne Vega.

I keep bringing up Suzanne Vega’s name because it’s very obvious that the songs on Toys of Vanity—indeed, the entire concept of the album—clearly takes its inspiration from Suzanne Vega’s songwriting and, to a certain degree, to the slightly-industrialized sound of Vega’s 99.9F°. Sevelle isn’t just ripping off Suzanne Vega, though: she’s taken the lyrical approach of Vega and aptly adapted it to her own style, which is a good thing, because after the light sugary confections of Taja Sevelle and Fountains Free, this more serious side of Taja Sevelle serves her much better.

The songs are almost universally awesome—starting with “I & I”, which sets the tone for most of the album. The second track, “Us” turns from self-criticism to criticism of everyone, including Sevelle herself, and features a beat straight out of Massive Attack and phased-out, echoey guitars that would’ve made Portishead proud (back when they were actually good). Sevelle really stretches her voice on this track, too, swinging across three whole octaves, but not in a self-indulgent, Mariah-Carey-esque fashion: the verses are delivered in her usual light, airy tone but for the choruses she drops to a lower register and really lets the full strength of her voice come forth.

My favorite track on the album is the fourth, “A Lot Like You”, which opens sounding like it’s going to be a throw-back to her earlier albums, until the buttery strings and the thumping, hip-hop beat kicks in and carries the track to greater heights. This is a straightforward R&B song, but there’s a certain darkness to the lyrics that really comes through the lush instrumentation to raise your hackles. There is a certain darkness to all of the tracks on this album which stains even the more R&B-inflected songs with a very trip-hopping chilliness.

The only song on the album that doesn’t fit is the sappy ballad “Fleet of Angels”, which really does sound like it should’ve been on one of Sevelle’s earlier albums. It’s very saccharine, sounding almost like a bad attempt at capturing the Carpenters’ sweetness. Not even the rather interesting beat programming can save the song from sounding like schmaltz—but that’s OK: the rest of the album is more than good enough, especially considering that the track following “Fleet of Angels” is the title track, “Toys of Vanity”, which begins with the rather spooky line, “Don’t you remember being born? I thought everyone remembered being born….”

The song is a clear indictment of materialism, with Sevelle decrying her need for the “toys of vanity” that we surround ourselves with to give our lives a shallow sense of meaning. However, the song is not a one-sided refutation of materialism: Sevelle admits that “sometimes I need my toys of vanity / that’s when I’m holding back my pain” because they provide a buffer of protection from the real world, even though that insulation isn’t always a good thing.

All in all, this is a tragically overlooked album that few seem to be familiar with. It was released with very little fanfare, and no doubt came as a shock to fans of Sevelle’s earlier work—if any of those fans still remembered her. Pop-R&B and dance fans, after all, have an extremely short attention span, and Sevelle’s first two albums are both short-term albums: effervescent snacks that barely leave an aftertaste on the palate after they’ve faded from memory. Not so with Toys of Vanity. When I first heard the album back in the late 1990s, I was firmly ensconced in my “only industrial music is worth listening to” phase because so much ’90s music sucked beyond belief. Toys of Vanity was like a splash of cold water in the face. It woke me up and has remained in my mind for over ten years now because it’s just so memorable.

Taja Sevelle’s very mature, very interesting and thoughtful Toys of Vanity is not a pop doughnut, easily eaten and forgotten, but a feast of strange flavors that linger and linger. I highly recommend this album to all trip-hop fans and fans of good, soulful R&B: It’s the real deal, and doesn’t deserve to be languishing in the .99¢ bins at the Record Exchange.

ADDENDUM: Also look for Sevelle’s bizarre little house cover of “Sympathy for the Devil”. It’s a total booty-shakin’ number.

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