Dwele Subject CD

Personnel includes: Dwele, Slum Village.
Producers includes: Dwele, Jake & The Phatman, Ronald Estill, Dwayne Bastiany, Pete Kuzma.
Dwele, first heard on the cool, relaxed chorus of Slum Village's "Tainted," isn't a leather-lunged shouter or, the likely guess, a silky-smooth crooner. Blessed with a fine, sensitive voice, he's a Marvin Gaye disciple, and like his influence, he has his own ideas about production and performance. That stubbornness makes him a difficult artist to pigeon-hole but an easy one to enjoy, especially for listeners tired of hearing constant repetition in R&B. Mostly self-produced and recorded at his home in Detroit, Subject favors the gauzy beats-and-bliss production style of Slum Village auteur Jay Dee. Though it's a familiar format, it's one that works well as a bed for his vocal style, which uses odd cadences, extended phrasing, multiple layers of vocals, and often his own whispered responses to his main lines. Halfway between R. Kelly and Madlib, Dwele writes toward R&B stereotypes but really makes the songs his own. On the title track, unsurprisingly a self-production, he accomplishes a rare feat, pulling off an inspirational song that truly sounds inspired. Dwele doesn't sound quite as interesting when he's not producing himself; a pair of outside productions, the single "Find a Way" and "Money Don't Mean a Thing," are intelligent, sensitive jams, but they make it clear that Dwele's talents don't tend to the anthemic. Like Gaye before him, he sounds more content and more inspired when the reins are in his hands. ~ John Bush
Meet the nu-soul--same as the old soul? Well, Dwele's debut certainly contains similarities to old-school artists such as Donny Hathaway and of course Stevie Wonder--all the evidence you need to connect the dots is here in the shimmering Fender Rhodes piano that predominates on SUBJECT.
But Dwele is made of more contemporary stuff. He's a rapper who's found his singing voice, though the only time his hip-hop roots really show is in the tumbling lyrics to the coming-of-age song "Twuneanunda" and the title track. Mostly he's a smoothly sophisticated singer with a canny sense of what works in an arrangement, and while he obviously has deep ties to what is now ancient R&B history, his sound is undeniably modern, and irresistibly seductive. Most of the cuts on SUBJECT are down-tempo, though the incidence of satin sheet-oriented boudoir ballads is kept to a surprising minimum. He's a more thoughtful lyricist than that, as evidenced by the nuanced, humorous "Lady at Mahogany," about a tryst gone awry, in which he shows he's not averse to telling tales on himself. SUBJECT is both light enough in feel and accomplished enough in execution to leave you hungry for more.The Source (7/03, p.154) - "...On his hypnotic debut, SUBJECT, Dwele again sings like he's tiptoeing in Timbs on the road to love..."