As the music industry slowly continues its gradual march towards the beat of brevity in the shape of extended plays and short singles, the art form itself seems to be softening and the artists contorting to conform to the highly digitised soundscape. BET Award-winning singer-songwriter Libianca Fonji, mononymously known as Libianca, shows her understanding of this shift with her debut EP, Walk Away, comprised of six songs – four of which are altogether new material.
Featuring guests such as Chloe, Oxlade, and Blaqbonez, the brief record comes swaddled in the neat wrapping of afrobeats tempered with tinctures of contemporary R&B and neo-soul and pinches of gospel influences.
The soul-filled eighteen minutes of playback time do not lean on the production, and with the little shimmy room, Libianca keeps in step with the sound, neither oversinging to extrude emotions wedged in the crevices of her subconscious nor overwriting to detail parts of her better left exposed for individual interpretation.
If it is true that the name of anything is a prophecy over the trajectory of its identity, Walk Away best exemplifies this truism. Centred around the controlling theme of self-preservation under the sub-theme of self-love, the Cameroonian-American vocalist spotlights the unreliability of those one is surrounded with, as seen on her breakthrough single, “People”. Similar verdicts mushroom all over the project in different styles.
With “In a Way”, Libianca crafts a cry of righteous indignation over poor treatment and the justification of abandoning such a relationship, whereas “Weight On My Shoulder” explores the same feelings but with the imagery of the relationship being a cumbersome burden.
In the compressed time she has, Fonji displays a facile ability to leap from one end of matters of the heart to another.
With nothing but the portal of her vocal cords and the incantations of her searching lyricism, the nightingale is able to tear through the fabric of what is on the surface to interrogate the intimate stitchings that make up her relationships with others and herself to gauge whether or not they are worth taking with her to beautiful future on the other end of the sunset.
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