Album Of The Week: Solange True

When Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed up at a Grizzly Bear show in Brooklyn three years ago, I was working for Pitchfork and had to write a news story about it, because that's what my life is like. In my original draft, I had a joke about how you kinda have to do what your sister-in-law wants to do when she's in town. My editor took that joke out, telling me that we didn't know that Solange Knowles dragged Jay and Bey to the show when they would've rather been spending quality time with their solid-gold pinball machine or whatever instead. Soon enough, though, we learned that I was right -- that the show had been Solange's idea and that Jay had not, in fact, been banging Yellow House in his Maybach on the way to Def Jam meetings. This was not a surprise. Plenty of big-money pop artists have experimented with indie-rock sonics, whatever that even means, in the past few years, and more will soon. (The smart ones will just hire Jamie xx and/or Frank Ocean, as Alicia Keys does on her own new album.) But Solange, alone in that universe, has always come across as the type of person who has serious opinions about what Deakin adds or takes away when he joins back up with Animal Collective. She's someone who moves through the indiesphere without making it look like a pandering grab at a new audience -- like she's Big Boi throwing Wavves on an album track. And now that Solange has finally made her indie record, she's made one that sounds like pop music, which is the smartest thing she could've possibly done.