291. Destiny's Child, "The Writing’s on the Wall"

 


I put this on last night while we were making dinner and I guess I was mildly surprised to find my wife dancing around the kitchen and singing along.  She was absolutely astonished that I had never heard this album before.  "Seriously?" she said.  "You don't know 'Bills, Bills, Bills?'" she asked.  I did not.  I gather this was a popular song!  "Where do you know it from?" I asked her.  The club, of course!  Specifically, she guessed, WPLJ's in Walnut Creek, which now appears to be closed.  (Not entirely surprising, based on the Yelp reviews.)  We were all young once.

So no, I didn't know "Bills, Bills, Bills," but that's what you get when you silo yourself musically like I did in the late 90's/early 00's.  It's an interesting song, with a harpsichord-sounding backing track and a complicated, swooping melody, along with the exquisite harmonies that wrote Destiny's Child's checks.

She also knew "Jumpin' Jumpin'," another new one on me, which I also liked quite a bit.  The voices are carefully intertwined, coming together and then separating, a really cool effect.  Like a lot of the other songs, it just sounds complicated.  The melody is all over the place, but that's a good thing.  But not all was lost!  I did recognize one song, "Say My Name," which I guess was so ubiquitous that even a hermit like me knew it.  I think my favorite was probably "Bug a Boo," which is laid over a syncopated sample from "Child's Anthem," an extremely 70's instrumental that opened Toto's first album, to excellent effect.  

As I have documented repeatedly here, R&B is one of the genres I'm least familiar and comfortable with, maybe the most, so I hesitate to expound at length.  I will say that I appreciated the incredible vocals and the studio artistry it takes to make recordings sound like this.  There are definitely echoes of earlier "girl groups" like the Supremes.  Destiny's Child, of course, launched Beyonce - whom we shall surely see again - into the stratosphere where she remains, smiling serenely down on all of us.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I would have to say yes.

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