Reijie Snow—Dear Annie Album Review
Cailtin Hicks | Ngāti Ranginui | She/Her
5/5 STARS
I was first introduced to Rejjie Snow through someone who, like Snow, hails from the northside of Dublin. In early 2018 when Snow’s debut album Dear Annie was released, we’d spend our Monday evenings drinking Fitou and grooving to “Charlie Brown” in our socks on the crumb-y wooden floor of his Lyon apartment. The dulcet tones of Mr Snow, born Alex Anyaegbunam, soundtracked some of my most precious memories. This is an album very close to my heart.*
Dear Annie is a tantalising introduction to the mysterious Rejjie Snow. In his deeply personal debut, he obsesses over a lover he allegedly abandoned to live in Paris. The tracklist narrates a love that’s messy, confusing, angsty, and utterly devastating. Snow’s vulnerability is painfully human and charming. Interludes weaved throughout inject an informal late-night-radio-all-access vibe offering insight into the man himself–context that enriches the surrounding tunes. Countless albums expound the folly of love, but none do it with as much nuance, humanity, and personality as this.
The monstrous 20-track record is a genre-bending masterpiece. Combining elements of rap, funk, jazz, soul, electronic, and pop, efforts are wasted attempting to confine this to a single musical category. It’s contemporary R&B at its finest: a bedrock of hip hop overlaid with woozy synth bass, rainbow pop melodies, melancholy instrumentals, and lucid vocals. Snow’s music shares qualities of the pop-py lullabies of Chance the Rapper and ad-libs that rival Tyler the Creator’s. It reflects vibey instrumentals à la Kaytranada, Sampha’s soul, and the inimitable musical flexibility of BROCKHAMPTON. While he joins a growing pack of genre-diverse artists, Snow is truly one of a kind.
“Hello” leads you into the album, an upbeat-come-moody instrumental overlaid with cheerful voices juxtaposed against Snow’s laidback Dub drawl. It’s a multitrack masterpiece that blurs the line between speech and lyric. Next up is “Rainbows”, a foot-tapper with an infectious melody and simple chorus—a capital-B Bop. “Rainbows” sounds like the butterflies-in-stomach nervous excitement of a first date, skipping down cobbled streets of your new city to Metro line D; afternoons spent holding hands on the Band Rotunda at Oriental Bay. Pairs well with pancakes.
“23” is an indictment of the messiness of love. In “The Rain”, Snow raps sweet nothings: pillow talk on a bed of bass. “Mon Amour”s buoyant instrumental teases you into a painfully articulate rap, topped with a sprinkling of french for good measure, and sex appeal. “Désolé” is mellow, moody and melancholy, without being depressing.
“Egyptian Luvr”, featuring Aminé, has had the most mainstream success with over 36 million Spotify streams. This might be the closest to an ‘ordinary’ R&B tune that Rejjie gets. “Bye Polar” merges rap and what one critic described as ‘strip club bounce’. The tail end of the song is a celestial, SBTRKT-style bassy instrumental. “Charlie Brown”, my most played song of 2018, is a modern take on Republic of Loose’s “The Steady Song”. The product? A veritable contemporary Irish jig with nonsensical lyrics that you’ll be humming for days, on a poppy foundation rivalling the foot-tappability of of Italo Disco.
Maybe I am a bit biased. Snow’s tranquil synth riffs and sickly-sweet melodies soundtracked my 2018* (and 2019, and 2020). I listened to Dear Annie as I tentatively approached love, as I wallowed in the incomprehensible joy of it, and when reality intervened to break my heart. From what I can ascertain, the highest praise available on the island of Ireland is a nonchalant ‘grand’. Rejjie Snow: he’s bloody grand.
*I actually wrote this review in early 2019 after this album saw me through a pretty devastating heartbreak. It wasn’t smooth sailing in that department for a while, and Rejjie helped me pick up the pieces every time. Class guy.