4AM, awakened by a roof no longer rattling: the distinct absence of rain.
A long-awaited reprieve, a fleeting window between when the wet had set and when it will start up again, your tired body is telling you to rise and seize the moment. It is early, so dark it might still be night, and outside every surface is twinkling gently, aglow under artificial light. These are the perfect conditions, you think, to step out of comfort and dive into the unknown – something new, colourful, alive. Enter aja monet’s ‘the color of rain.’
Pressing play you immediately find yourself transported elsewhere, encouraged to speak your truth with your chest in an opening track that establishes the proceeding hour of poetry as one that will practice what it preaches; penned with such deft clarity and confidence, spoken in cadences so decisive they can’t not get stuck in your head, monet and her words guide your step and command your breath that lingers in the chilled air.
The streets quiet, you walk on the road, allowing yourself the appropriate space to swim in these sonic pools of soothing, subdued grooves before the sudden burst of headlights brings on a tempest of horns and drums; evacuate the road, evacuate ‘hollyweird.’ Likewise, in time you will find the album glides freely between moods of tenderness and unrest, appraisal and introspection, anger and joy, each appropriately accompanied by either wild, whimsical, or contemplative instrumentals, and no one less impassioned or driven by Love than any other.
From line to line, song to song, every idea flows together in a beautiful and steady stream of consciousness, washing over you – and between pleas to humanity and odes to the hard-working, laughing in the face of time and then crying at how it’s commodified, it is no surprise that time has flown fast, leaving you back once more at your front door, but now under the indigo of a sunrise in wait, gradually gaining confidence behind dew-dropped branches. At the end of this journey of carefully chosen words, you consider the purpose behind the title that brings them together, and what it means to you.
To be the colour of rain is to embody it, to take on all the hues and shades of the world around you, and be the light that shines through it; it is to nourish and rejuvenate that world, even when you’re not welcome; it is to be love, with, unalone, because only when droplets pour in abundance is their power really felt, and their colour truly seen.
Forged in a world on fire, monet imparts the ways with which to douse the flame. There couldn’t be an album better for our current climate.
Words by Evelynn Eden