Day Soul Exquisite are a Jazz-Soul Rainbow on Sanguine & Cardamom

When I listen to Day Soul Exquisite’s Sanguine & Cardamom EP, I don’t hear perfectionism. Perfectionism requires a certain level of sanitization, an impulse that desperately needs to be reined in by everybody everywhere. What I hear instead is six talented individuals meeting each other at their halfway points and producing something much more compelling.

Though it’s functionally an EP on track count, it’s long enough to be a full-length. Most of its songs either approach or clear the five-minute mark. Urgency is clearly not a priority here. “Disentangle” takes almost a minute and a half to introduce vocalist Francesca Eluhu; the song slowly opens like a tea flower as the rest of the band conjures audible incense smoke, and its languid pace lines up with Eluhu’s words about getting free. Free from what? The grid maybe, or the echo chamber, or omnidirectional judgment, or commonplace injustice. The song reads like a scorn-wracked love letter that could be written to humanity at large. “I can’t deny how I love you/despite all that we’ve been through,” Eluhu sings on the chorus before circling the issue in red pen: “…And all the ways you disapprove/of who I am/and what I do.”

Of neo-soul’s progenitors, I’d argue that it was Maxwell who most effectively postulated the genre as a carnal package wrapped in cerebral cellophane. I hear Sanguine & Cardamom as a leaf on that branch; its songs center bodies and the space between them, but the tone bends ever toward the political. The best sex always happens after you clear the air first, and there’s a lot of air to clear here. The EP’s most joyous song occurs early on the strutting “Yonic,” on which the band embraces the spirit over the body through its narrative of two lovers linked by the soul (“Whisper you love me under the skin,” coos Eluhu at its end, culminating). Otherwise, there is indignance and confusion, vexed righteousness and sorrowful recoiling, and it could read heavy were that all not integrated so seamlessly into its grooves.

Stylistically the EP may fuse bristling jazz with classic smooth neo-soul, but it isn’t a uniform hue so much as a rainbow, each of its distinct colors flying in parallel arcs. That’s apparent from the mixing alone; each part feels distinct, from Thomas Arndt’s sneaky, effective percussion (check the bongos as “Futures” progresses, for example) to Josh Pehrson’s versatile drumming. Xiomara Mills has three saxophone solos, and each are sublime. Eluhu’s voice, while scarce on hooks, harmonizes quite nicely with itself on tracks like “Disentangle” and “Futures.” The only time the band swirls itself into amorphous chaos is on “Abbatoir,” the EP’s final and most intense track; otherwise, Samuel Wesner’s engineering keeps each of the band’s contributions disparate. It reinforces the notion of Day Soul Exquisite as a collective of like-minded souls rather than a singular voice. A band is a house of differences, but Day Soul Exquisite’s members channel their specious differences into their strengths.

You can’t say it’s not the time for it, especially when significant, bewildering swathes of America find people like co-lyricist/bassist Zora Seboulisa or keyboardist Lillian Minke Tahar among the most dire existential threats to the country. Together those two carry the EP’s strongest moment, the transition from the brief poem “Sum of Our Parts” to the slow, poignant “Mosaic.” On it, Minke Tahar’s keys rise and fall in slow breaths, half lullaby and half dirge; over them, Seboulisa outlines a tragedy and ruches it with acceptance. Like “Disentangle,” it’s a song that works on granular and grand terms. It could be a lover or society at large to which its subject is chained, but the chain, and the yearning to loosen oneself from it, is at its core. As her introduction to Day Soul’s recorded work, Seboulisa’s poetry is gorgeous and her voice is revelatory, instantly expanding the possibilities of where the band may travel next. (Then again, just like a rainbow, the destination is less important than the sight of the arc itself.)