Maura Magazine | Silver

Silver

Much of this week’s music-related talk was dominated by Kanye West’s humble and gender-balanced Yeezus, but on Tuesday night I hit up my local Target to vote with my dollars and pay cash money for Talk A Good Game, the new album by Kelly Rowland. It’s a solid R&B collection with a wonderful narrative arc—woman falls into a bad romance and, after getting out of it with assistance from her friends (in this case, her former bandmates in Destiny’s Child), she’s so liberated so as to seem like she’s soaring way above earth, then has a solid back-to-reality landing anchored by “Street Life,” a booty-shaking funk jam. Its release was overshadowed by the bluster and bombast emanating not just from Kanye, but from his fellow men of hip-hop J. Cole and Mac Miller, but it’s probably the album from this week’s new-release slate I’ll be listening to the most over the coming summer weeks. It will also pair well with this issue, which has tales of spying and sipping and coming of age.