ALBUM REVIEW: Red Moon in Venus

Kali Uchis - Red Moon in Venus

It’s been a hazy last month and Kali Uchis has arisen from the storm. With the days just starting to get longer and spring coming, she delivers with good timing the entrancing Red Moon in Venus. 

Uchis dropped her sophomore record towards the end of 2020, an isolating and exhausting year (to put it lightly) and provided her diehard fans with a gift for surviving the year. A Spanish influenced album, featuring the ear-candy and catchy track, telepatía, alongside the angsty and revenge filled song, fue major, later received a feature from SZA. However, in her third LP, she takes it back to her roots and fully indulges in pop and R&B, similar to the demos Uchis posted to SoundCloud in the early 2010s and fully produced from her car backseat that would garner her attention, she continues to effortlessly blend the two genres and establish her dominance as a singer and songwriter.

 “I just wanted to tell you, in case you forgot I love you” Uchis affirms to listeners on the starting track, “in My Garden…,” that this album is about one thing for sure: love. The emotion can be described so broadly and embraced in so many stages, but Uchis breaks it down for us and establishes that this album is her personal take on the feeling and from her lyrics it appears as if she is a definite goddess of love. “I wish you well I wish you roses while you can still smell them” Uchis tells her past lover, establishing that there are no hard feelings between the two and relishes in the new freedom, she has nothing but love to offer now. 

Uchis collects a handful of features collaborating with her current boyfriend, Don Toliver, Omar Apollo, and Summer Walker. Uchis pulls a collection of producers from Josh Crocker, Rodney Jerkins, Kendick Lamar, and Benny Blanco. Despite the number of hands on the record, Red Moon in Venus is her most cohesive and most addictive sonically to date.
 
The record continues with Kali singing on, “Love Between,” an interpolation of the oldies classic by The Temprees, “Love… Can Be So Wonderful,” producing a melody that will leave you humming to yourself for hours. Catering to her Latine fans, “Hasta Cuando & Como Te Quiero Yo,” Uchis teases some Spanish songs in the middle of the record, only a taste of what’s to come in her fourth record, a Spanish focused album. On the tail end of the record, Uchis offers another highlight in, “Blue,” with a killer saxophone playing in the background and Uchis voice intertwining with the beat, very reminiscent of Sade’s hits and pays homage to the vocal legend. 

It seems as if my social media has been flooded with astrology posts this last week and my friends who are deep into astrology brag about a ‘vibe shift’ felt from the last week.  However, I can personally affirm that the only ‘vibe shift’ occurring is the world healing with the release of Red Moon in Venus. 

- DJ Jorgo 

Recommended if you like: Sade, Raveena, Ravyn Lenae, Solange
Recommended Tracks: 3, 4, 8, 9, 13
FCC: Explicit – Track 7, 8, 11, 13