Album Review: Briana Marela Cleanses You With Music To “Call It Love”

When you take a steamed shower, the haziness surrounding you can be mystifying. As you belt out tunes and let the cloudiness of water cleanse you, a bathroom suddenly becomes a fantasy arena. With each drop of soap, your skin clears, your mind wanders, and, for a time in your day, you feel small and okay with it. I bring up this scenario because Briana Marela’s Call It Love treats relationships and music like, an hour to lather and rejuvenate yourself from the outside world.

Call It Love is like a sonic shower. Synths and keys billow forward as Briana Marela vocally becomes the mist of every time you had to scrub away a lover or rinse yourself with a partner’s piercing words. Tracks like, “ Be In Love”, “Rise”, and “Quit” are like pieces of art-deco sophistication. Instrumentally, this album experiments with beauty like a soundtrack for a MOMA exhibition; you walk into a room and watch images and sounds play before you to determine whether you have the imagination to find their meaning. This musical cause has a double standard. On one hand, Marela utters her lyrics and alternates chords like they were fueled fantasies that she struggles to decide whether she should wake up from as in, “Give Me Love” and “Farthest Shore”. Yet, on another hand, she drips her verses and slow rhythms like tears she has cried to wash away the dirt of lovers’ quarrels like, “Last Time” and “I’m Sorry”. No matter what, the objective of Marela is to create an album where both her and her listeners are free to feel. Hence, why she fuzzes and muddles her vocals to show that giving yourself “emotional permission” is a clarifying/ cleansing act, but nobody walks into a shower and gets, automatically, clean. “Call It Love”, “He Knows” , and “Feel What I Feel” show that rejuvenation is a process, especially when you are deciding to refresh yourself from an ex or your perception/ expectations on love.

Briana Marela has intrigued me with Call It Love. Not many artists go as introspectively or purposefully into their record quite like her. It is clear that Marela want to revamp the notion of love as definer of her life, in which self-love moves to the forefront. Hence, Call It Love shows that there are many things that can appear like love, but if you are not aware of what love means to you, then you will find yourself taking a lot spiritual showers to cleanse jading images. For More Information On Briana Marela And To Buy Call It Love On August 4 Click Here.