Boots: AQUARIA

The fact that you still can't mention Boots without also mentioning Beyoncé teaches two mournful lessons: 1) It's a mixed bag to start your career with a zeitgeist-definitive icon re-recording your best songs,  and 2) It's even harder when you struggle to find a distinctive voice on your own. Four-fifths of Beyoncé had Boots' stamp on it, and since then the artist and producer, whose real name is Jordan Asher, has been busy. He's brought his surly, gentle, unfurling darkness to a feature-heavy mixtape, a series of well-chosen collaborations—Run the Jewels and FKA twigs, most recently—and now a first album, Aquaria. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered; it's a ball of static electricity, its aesthetic distinct. And nevertheless, Boots remains in his own shadow, his debut album eclipsed by his debut.

As a musician, Boots has an ear for sweet melody and a percussive, subtle, muscular style. His instincts cleave to R&B easily, and innovate from inside the genre; you can hear this happy marriage clearly on "Haunted," the Beyoncé meditation that was originally a Boots track called "I'm Onto You." Aquaria recalls that track's sound world directly: the instrumentation that rattles and slaps, the vocal line narrow. Aquaria itself is a rock album cumulatively – its soul is Mad Max and Jesus' Son, as if someone pushed Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead underwater and made them kiss – but Boots's primary instinct is genre agnosticism. This is an enormous benefit to the artists who work with him, but it's often a detriment when he's left alone.

As a rule, Boots' instrumentals are much more persuasive and emotionally precise than his vocals. The slinky and rabble-rousing title track is a highlight, and not coincidentally because Angel Deradoorian is paired against a great, fat, delicate clap in the beat. "I Run Roulette," another standout, is hard-edged pop that rides the contrast between the pitch-black riot that serves as the backdrop and the verses, which come very close to bubble-grunge.

But Boots has an imprecise delivery as a vocalist. When he sings, or just as often sing-raps, you often forget what he's trying to say. Part of the difficulty lies in the lyrics. They're half-heartedly combative, noncommittally weird, full of half-clever neologisms: like the song title "Oraclies," for "oracle" and "lies." On "Bombs Away," Boots sings: "All the wolves are famous/ Hide the rich and shameless/ Thirsty like an addict/ Hope is for the tragic/ Sell me down a new stream/ New world has new dream." The same restless, idle soothsaying comes in on "C.U.R.E.," a track that aches for a Run the Jewels guest verse (El-P is a co-producer on Aquaria) but, with Boots at the helm, sounds almost, truly, like Crazytown. There's a slightness in his voice that he doesn't use well; there's a melodic whimsy in his aesthetic that's best matched either with formidable guest charisma or else with his own production, its taut anxiety left unverbalized, slicing and revving away.

As on WinterSpringSummerFall, snippets of melody are briefly mesmerizing here; on Aquaria, the old-fashioned slow-dance ballad "Only" is a beautiful lament. "I am the only one alive," he sings, then switches: "You are the only one alive." Those are your options, solipsism or fixation; the album whirls between the two poles to occasionally claustrophobic effect. Each song confines you to a small set of characters: a bassline, a beat knocking, a squidge of sonic interference, a melody. 

For all of Boots' fluidity and technical proficience, his solo work seems hampered by his attachment to pop, which doesn't fit his elusive profile. Aquaria could explode live, with two drummers at Boots' back. But in speakers, the album feels just pop enough in intention that its pleasures seem noticeably absent; with a few strong exceptions, the album could be a folder of songs waiting for someone else to bring them to life. Boots has talent enough to make a star, or to elevate a star to a new realm. You wonder who his next one will be.