Six years since the release of her acclaimed album Chilombo, American singer-songwriter Jhené Aiko’s new body of work, Westside Whimsy, serves as a musical journal of a lifetime worth of entries—much can and has happened to the crooner, off and on record, since the drop of her 2020 project.
For twenty songs, Westside Whimsy hardly deviates from Aiko’s standard formula of contemporary R&B and neo-soul, with the singer opting for ambient and airy-fairy production. Dovetailing well with her honeyed vocal deliveries and feather-light melodies, the soundscape of the album, from the brief album opener, promises an album that is a cathartic release with its solemn moods and serene atmosphere. The Grammy-nominated songstress has made a defining lane for herself with her penchant for soft and elegant musicianship, and with Whimsy, she leans on what she does best, and the approach works well sonically while augmenting the strength of her hard-to-digest substance, a contrast that creates artistry that is striking and music that stays long after the final second of a song ends.
Westside Whimsy cover art | SUPPLIED
Extracting music from her personal and well-documented experiences, or at least ostensibly despite her vehement denial in public about certain songs being about a certain someone, the album explores a wide range of sub-themes that fall under the overarching theme of escapism. The album first sees Aiko traverse the terrains of escaping her past and fighting conflicts of defining her present and future self (“Ghost”, “Break”, and “Lullaby”). These subthemes segue into quiet anger and grief over a past relationship with a wayward lover (“Love Bomb”, “Ceiling (Freestyle)”, and “He Belongs”) and acceptance of lovers and things that can’t be changed for the better (“Nothing to Say” and “You”).
Many of these sub-themes reek of familiar material, with Aiko and rapper Big Sean splitting up after nearly a decade together and also as parents of their child. The sour ending of the relationship serves as the compass for Jhené’s rather bleak and deterministic view of love as a “sinking ship” while also taking up a stance of devaluation to minimise the evident impact the breakup had on her. Westside Whimsy is a record of a woman enraged and deeply saddened, and this can be plucked from scathing lyrics such as “You the type a b**** a mother could make, when they daddy don’t stay” on “Ceiling (Freestyle)”. And many of these negative feelings are aimed at the lover she now despises, but also, by extension, at herself for allowing herself to be used and for the best of her years to be wasted, as heard on “Love Bomb”.
Jhené Aiko | SUPPLIED
The other portion of the album, still expanding on the controlling theme of escapism, focuses on Jhené pulling herself together and mustering the willpower and energy to move on and to find love once again. This is the lighter side of the album, which simultaneously preserves Jhené’s former intensity on the record. Here, Aiko touches on healing and putting the past behind her (“Like, Whatever” and “Neighbors”) as well as being open to welcome love when it comes visiting again (“Mine” and “So Good”). However, another thing worth noting is Jhené’s self-fulfilling prophecy of being “stuck in a loop”—the singer-songwriter allows herself to move on, but there are still grains and bits of sand in her wounds that proclaim their existence, even as she tries to forge ahead.
And even though the record features deep lyricists such as Ab-Soul and Kendrick Lamar, Jhené never loses the spotlight, performance-wise. Whether she is singing through and through, doing a little musical soliloquy, or rapping her pain away, Jhené remains strikingly articulate about her feelings, about her bitterness, about her soul-deep exhaustion. The album, as the cover illustrates, is a portrait of an aggrieved and tearful woman, the background signalling the existence of melancholy that serves as the pervasive underpinning of the album’s structural integrity. Everything feels right about the album even though the artist goes on to talk at length about everything that has gone wrong in her love life and her internal world as a woman on a journey of healing and finding love.
Jhené Aiko | SUPPLIED
Westside Whimsy is a record that lays everything on the table, shamelessly bearing all the shame that might’ve been buried underneath the façade of decency and keeping a front. An opus of conflict and striving to get to a better place, the album might be a love letter to herself, but it is also sure to be a kindred spirit and a refuge of solace to others out there who have loved, lost, and felt cheated by lovers they gave their best to, only for the romantic venture to unfortunately go bust.
Preview of the album below:
