Teyana Taylor: KTSE review – Taylor and Kanye combine grit and soul

On each consecutive Friday, since late May, the public has been issued with a Kanye West-produced seven-track album from an artist on his GOOD Music roster. That is, until this Friday, when the clockwork-like run – which has so far included records from Nas, Pusha T, West himself and Kids See Ghosts, his collaboration with Kid Cudi – was supposed to come to an end with R&B singer Teyana Taylor’s second album. On Thursday, Kim Kardashian West tweeted that her husband was completing the record on the plane back from Paris fashion week. Friday came and went.

Eventually, the album arrived on Saturday, by then lunchtime in the UK. The tardiness felt a tad disrespectful to Taylor – who spent Friday retweeting memes about the album’s delay – especially considering that her career hinged on West’s patronage far more so than any of the other artists involved in his creative reckoning. The 27-year-old has had a meandering and slightly befuddling trajectory since she signed her first record deal in 2007. In the years since, she’s appeared as one of the spoilt teenagers on the MTV docu-series My Super Sweet 16, choreographed videos for West and Beyoncé, and, in 2014, released her debut album, a collection of slinky but safe R&B. Earlier this year, Taylor returned to reality TV with the premiere of VH1 series Teyana & Iman, which followed her and her NBA star husband, Iman Shumpert.

Once KTSE arrived, however, it was hard to stay cross with West for long. The album (the title stands for Keep That Same Energy) takes the artfully distorted old-school R&B samples that double as his calling card – the ones that, over the years, he’s rendered increasingly abrasive and jarring – and returns them to a more blissed-out and soulful sound. That’s not to say there’s no gratifyingly contrarian editing: on opener No Manners, a gothic, gruff vocal is cut off mid-sentence before Gonna Love Me’s rapturous, pitched-up Delphonics sample kicks in, while the beginning of Issues/Hold On sees West layer a tantalising portion of Billy Stewart’s I Do Love You under a boyish blast of laser sound effects.

That said, that the reason this tactic has worked so well for West in the past is because he juxtaposed those saccharine, sped-up samples with his crabby, unhurried rapping. Occasionally, on KTSE, the vintage crooning is accompanied merely by more crooning courtesy of Taylor. Yet, most of the time, the pair manage to subtly offset the two components, doing so particularly well on Rose in Harlem, which matches an ancient-sounding slice of a Stylistics song with a fierce half-rapped singing style and muscular melisma.

That song addresses the setbacks and career stalls that Taylor has experienced, as the Harlem native paints herself as that hardy rose. Lyrically speaking, it’s probably the most interesting track on KTSE, which is essentially a collection of love songs directed at her “handsome hubby” (as she describes him on No Manners). Yet while the romantic lyrics can seem emptily sentimental, they are infinitely preferable to the misjudged sauciness of Hurry and 3Way. The former is an initially pleasing reggae-laced ode to Taylor’s own bum that descends, agonisingly, into a series of orgasmic moans. The latter is a depressing tribute to threesomes with an unidentified “hoe” – who is quickly escorted out of her home once the deed is done – accompanied by unnecessarily graphic detail from Ty Dolla $ign.

Generally, these missteps seem a relatively small price to pay for a record that melds new and old R&B with such flair. And as if to address potential complaints that proceedings could have been more in-your-face, the album concludes with a wild left turn that brings with it new frontiers for both Taylor and West. The latter previously drew on house music on 2016’s Fade (whose video starred Taylor), but on WTP he amps up the tempo, recruits rapper and performance artist Mykki Blanco and incorporates samples from Paris Is Burning, the cult film about 1980s New York ballroom culture. Best of all, its brash, jacked-up backing track provides something for Taylor’s effortless voice to rub up against. It’s a welcome bit of friction – and, like the album it belongs to, a treat worth waiting for.