Victoria Monét is riding a high, and she wants the listener to experience and revel in that feeling of nourishing good will. So much so that she’s capping off her breakout ‘ J AGUAR II ’ era with a ten-track coda that elegantly cements her status as a classic soul torchbearer. In the last year, Monét moved from the fringes to the main leagues with multiple Grammy wins, including Best New Artist , a show-stopping BET awards performance , and an A-list collaboration with a revived Usher, on recent duet ‘ SOS ‘ .
Just recently Monét announced her split from her partner John Gaines , but none of the songs on this deluxe edition are doused in heartbreak. Instead, embers of languid soul music smoulder across songs that run the gamut between bedroom balladry and self-loving euphonics. Monet’s ability to sing about sex and romantic aspiration without moving into hedonism is part of her modish charm.
She expresses her desire as a natural inclination – an inevitability, like on opener ‘DickAtNight’, where a hankering for the D isn’t treated as a yearning but a matter-of-fact compulsion. What could be trite or distant is delivered with gusto over jaunty big bad brassiness – the clever intermixing of classic instrumentation with modern idioms elevating this number beyond its ribald detail. — — ‘JAGUAR II: Deluxe’ gives Monét space to lean into her strength as a flume to another era with sketch-like allusions to Maxwell’s ‘Urban Hang Suite’-era .
