The Trouble With Being Myself

Welcome back to the conscious funky reggae party. If you’ve shopped at Macy’s before you’ll have a fair idea of what’s on the racks again this season: purple feather boas, furry boots, ankle-length fake minks, gaudy afros, an amazing technicolour dream coat of many strands. That’s the style – the sound is an equally complicated weave of Parliament-ary party ambience, ragged ballads and daytime radio friendly funk, all topped off by a rather charming soul crone’s voice.

We know she sells, but Ms Gray is also a woman of character, too uncouth to be lumped in with Lauryn but more substantial and versatile than likable wailers such as Anastasia. And don’t let the title put you off – she’s far too much of an extrovert to succumb to fame-addled navel gazing or woe-is-me new money moaning. Yes, that voice sometimes evokes Billie’s bluest blues, but having crawled out of her own personal doldrums, Macy seems intent on whooping it up.

For example: the opening ‘When I See You’ riffs on a Jacksons guitar over vintage disco soft shoe shuffles, as the smiley happy chorus exults in the bloom of infatuation (“Baby when I see you/I’m gonna kiss you all over your face”), before slipping into something just as comfortable, the lilting skip-rope rhymes of ‘It Ain’t The Money’. And do my ears deceive me, or is that Beck doing a walk-on white boy pimp roll in full-on Midnite Vultures mode?

Anyway, Macy does both sides of the actor’s mask very well, balancing the party animal (‘Come Together’) with the natural melancholic (‘Jesus For A Day’). On the latter end, ‘She Ain’t Right For You’ is tender and conversational, a gentle heads up to a brother who’s nosing the wrong truffles, in other words, a gal who ain’t Macy. This is the kind of thing she does best: pure feel, tired and emotional vocals, Stylistics strings and feelgood Staples trimmings.

The thing about colour clash/co-ordination – if you have the front for it, as Macy does – is that you get to yoke together no end of apparently contradictory elements: ‘Things That Made Me Change’ has the tell-all factor of a Joni but sets it to threads that join Prince’s pyschedelic funk to ‘I Am The Walrus’ to the Memphis Horns, while ‘My Fondest Childhood Memories’ is a tone poem painted by Basquiat and attached to a truly screwball crossbreeding of bottom-heavy bluebeat and funky Paris cabaret.

And speaking of front, she frequently balances the ego and the id by way of barefaced cheek, tempting one elusive suitor with the taunt of, “She don’t write songs about you” while the backing track simultaneously references The Womacks, Stevie’s Innervisions and Sly Stone’s watery wah-wah, all nailed down by a Motown house band trap-kit.

Later on, ‘Screamin’ enhances the kind of chord sequence from which Van has milked entire albums with a can-I-get-a-hallelujah hookline, while the closing ‘Every Now And Then’ pivots on one of those impossibly jerky yet fluid funk-outs Sheila E used to cough up on demand for Prince tunes like ‘Tambourine’.

So yes, she’s an incurable magpie, but Macy also has the sense to know what to throw away. The Trouble With Being Myself manages the neat feat of being flagrant and lean at the same time.