Fountain Baby Album Review

Fountain baby is a release and an escape which brought me closer to joy, colour and light when I needed it the most. It is a sonic universe which celebrates chaos, vulnerability, love, drama and freedom. It’s for the girls who want to have fun, who want to feel loved and who have a volatile tendency to burn everything to the ground, including themselves. Cohesive. Experimental. Vulnerable and Fluid.

Lately I’ve been struggling with an irrational fear of running out of ideas and no longer being able to write – that my ‘break’ would turn into another four-year hiatus where I walk around like a zombie without any drive, motivation or vision to create or write anything. I’ve recently started articles, reviews and stories only to stop halfway because I didn’t believe in what I was writing or it didn’t feel like me. Then I heard Fountain Baby at 1.00am on 8 June 2023, the day the album dropped. After listening to the album continuously till about 3:00am, I was reminded that sometimes you listen to music or you expose yourself to art that gives you no choice but to write and document how it made you feel and why it is important to you. Fountain baby is a release and an escape which brought me closer to joy, colour and light when I needed it the most. It is a sonic universe which celebrates chaos, vulnerability, love, drama and freedom. Its for the girls who want to have fun, who want to feel loved and who have a volatile tendency to burn everything to the ground, including themselves. Cohesive. Experimental. Vulnerable and Fluid. These are four words which instantly came to mind when I listened to the album for the first time. Many listens after, these themes are not only apparent but firmly ingrained in the musical fabric of Fountain Baby – Reckless and Sweet was the perfect teaser to the main event, as the duality of those words ring true through the entire project.

The album begins with the anticipatory warning that is ‘All my love.’ The introductory song is 43 seconds of calm before the storm. It is the silence and peace before opening up pandora’s box. Moments later, we are transported to ‘Angels in Tibet’ which is extremely high tempo and full of life. Despite how different the tempos are, the transition from ‘All my love,’ to ‘Angels in Tibet,’ is unexpected, but not jarring. It is engineered perfectly to wake the listener up and transport her to a club where people are sweating, dancing and having a good time, not standing by the wall and looking half dead. This theme of what I like to call ‘organic contrast ‘ is dotted across Fountain Baby and is most evident and intriguing on ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide,’ – the tenth song on the album, which is essentially two songs in one. Typically, when an artist has two songs in one, there is a bridge which separates the two halves or there is a short instrumental or interlude to signal the change in pace. Artists also tend to stick to the same genre or complementary genres in the second half of the song, as opposed to exploring a completely new form of music within the same song. Examples of ‘two part’ songs which adopt this formula are Frank Ocean’s ‘Nights,’ and Kehlani’s ‘Open (Passionate).’ On ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide,’ Amaarae discards this formula and adopts her own. She rejects functionality or conventional structure to deliver two parallel sounds: emo trap and punk-rock. ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide’ is meant to feel disjointed, it is meant to give the impression of changing direction in an uncomfortable way. The song starts off with auto-tuned vocals laced with a nonchalant haziness and depressive tone, as Amaarae confronts the fact that she loves her subject ‘too much for [her] own good.’ The vulnerability of the first half is replaced swiftly with the punk-rock inspired second half, reminiscent of a child throwing a temper tantrum because she does not get her way. This ending feels like moments before a car crash and encapsulates the chaos, uncontrollable disruption and heightened emotions of a turbulent relationship.

On Fountain baby, Amaarae’s musical influences are not only clear but they bleed through the lyrics, production and essence of the album. I particularly loved hearing the afrobeats inspired elements on this project and seeing how experimental Amaarae was with the sound. ‘Aquamarie Luvs Ecstasy,’ ‘Water and Wine,’ ‘Big Steppa,’ and ‘Disguise,’ are heavily influenced by afrobeats but in true Amaarae fashion, she delivers afrobeats in her own way – with a twist. She gives us afrobeats on steroids. ‘Aquamarie Loves Ecstasy,’ feels like Amaarae’s rendition of the melodious and laid back afrobeats, which was pioneered by Wizkid’s ‘Made in Lagos.’ On ‘Disguise,’ the repetitive delivery of the chorus ‘you got me hypnotized,’ is one of my favourite things about the album because of how afrobeats coded her cadence and tonality is on the delivery of this verse. ‘Water and Wine,’ feels effortless – her measured and calm delivery of ‘shake it, don’t break it,’ is inviting, warm and sultry. ‘Big Steppa,’ bridges the gap between continental afrobeats and what I like to call afrobeats-lite, the latter being the type of afrobeats Drake would feature on, not the type Skepta or Dave would feature on. I think ‘Big Steppa,’ meets somewhere in the middle and it makes sense that such a song would exist on an Amaarae album, considering she grew up in Ghana and Atlanta and adopts both diasporic and continental visions of what her lifestyle and creative outlook is as a young black person.

Amaarae is an artist who not only loves music, but you can tell she studies it, she pays attention and there’s a careful intentionality in the way she takes nostalgic elements and inspiration from the Neptunes production and makes these elements her own. On both ‘Princess Going Digital’ and ‘Counterfeit,’ Amaarae sounds confident, self assured and in her element but she does not let the Neptunes produced, ‘Wamp Wamp (what it do)’ sample drown out her individuality on ‘Counterfeit.’ Such intentionality is also evident in the way she incorporates live instrumentals in her music as heard through the Kora instrumentalist and Japanese folk sample (‘Battaki’), which is heard on the cinematic masterpiece that is ‘Wasted Eyes.’ In addition, the disco-inspired pop on ‘Sociopathic Dance Queen’ and ‘Co-Star,’ should not go unnoticed as these songs also highlight Amaarae’s fluidity and commitment to experimentation.

Fountain Baby is interesting because although it marks a new era for Amaarae, it does not feel like a re-invention or re-introduction to her artistry. Instead, Fountain Baby presents an evolution of Amaarae’s sound; a testament to her study and love for music and her exploration of emotional exposure and honesty. In an interview with Vulture, Amaarae shares that Fountain Baby is about romance and it was inspired by her last relationship. There are a lot of subtexts interwoven in the lyrics, which are personal to her and the relationship she shared with one person. Although I loved Amaarae’s first album, this type of exposure and honesty was not as apparent on ‘The Angel You Don’t Know.’ By embracing vulnerability on Fountain Baby, Amaarae is peeling off a layer of protection she had around herself in earlier projects and showing more skin in many ways – not solely through her more femme inspired clothing, but also through her exploration of uncomfortable emotions within the music. These emotions range from having feelings for someone but not being able to act on those feelings because ‘there are too many things to loose,’ as expressed on ‘Wasted Eyes’ or numbing painful emotions with recreational drugs or finding God through her vices as expressed on ‘Coming home to God,’ ‘Disguise,’ ‘Angels in Tibet,’ and so many other songs on the album. These are all darker aspects of youth culture which many of us experience but might not express openly. Growing up, experiencing life and going through the motions is a messy experience. Nothing feels linear and nothing is promised, but life goes on regardless and we should try to find pockets of joy and have fun along the way. Through Fountain Baby, Amaarae expresses and accepts this realisation over catchy lyrics, intricate production and beautiful melodies.