Maleek Berry’s winter daze: Another season, another win

24 Jan 2018 - 13:23

Within the relentlessly groovy beats and melodies on First Daze of Winter, Maleek Berry sings, “Now the summer is over / Now my winters are colder”.

New season: Maleek Berry returns with First Daze of Winter. Photo: Berry's Room

That line connects his new EP, First Daze of Winter, with its predecessor, the superb Last Daze of Summer from 2016; it also name-checks this project’s title. Most important, it links both EPs emotionally.

That earlier album was intended for partying, yet on two songs—‘Lost in the World’ and ‘Let me Know’—Berry showed he has time for contemplation, if only contemplation of the romantic kind. The new project continues Maleek’s dance-melancholy project.

Taken together, the Summer and Winter EPs elect Maleek Berry as a sort of prodigal son of an unlikely union between Asa and Wizkid.

Like Wizkid, his melodies and beats compels the idle listener to the dancefloor, but listen closely and save for such songs as ‘Kontrol’ and ‘Eko Miami’ and ‘Sisi Maria’ from the new project, he isn’t super-friendly with lust or liquor. And while he isn’t as delicately sober as Asa, Maleek Berry is quite adept at conveying longing and thwarted romance. Four songs of his new set of six give off vibes of less than blissful love. It is one of these songs— the trap-music influenced ‘What If’—that contains the line “Now my winters are colder”.

But despite these, Winter lends itself to partying. Especially on ‘Sisi Maria’ where the Igbo highlife guitar makes an appearance and on the excellent ‘Own It’, where, surrounded by some remarkably syncopated percussion production, he sings these lines, employing a set of sonorous semi-stammers on the chorus:

I dey mad
I dey crase
Your love gat me wasted
Girl your whine e be like wine
You got me drunk, you got me high

Because of the force of those two songs on the EP, Wizkid’s patriarch overwhelms Asa’s cool mum. But it would be interesting to see what happens should the London-raised producer and performer allow his tendency towards melancholy dominate a project.

This project, First Daze of Winter, is not quite as consistently thrilling as Last Daze of Summer, but it continues the Maleek Berry hit-making streak.