Pretty Idea

Amber Mark has mastered the art of honoring tradition without getting hamstrung by it. Like Brittany Howard and Nourished by Time, she’s comfortable in the present as well as the past, and she can bend both to her needs. The New York-based singer and producer has covered Eddie Kendricks and Sade, and she leans toward arrangements inspired by the layered vocals and instrumentation of ’80s soul and funk. Like the FCC-friendly stars of old, she even cusses sparingly and tends to pine for touch rather than sex. “Hate sleeping by myself these nights/The empty space fills up my mind,” Mark sang achingly on her first record. It’s easy to lose track of the year when listening to her music.

Three Dimensions Deep, Mark’s space-themed debut, charted a new age journey of self-discovery through R&B and pop. She continued the adventure on last year’s breezy EP Loosies, effortlessly sliding from swinging synth-funk to thumping house and druggy sing-rap. Mark manages the sweep of Janelle Monáe or Bruno Mars with half the sweat and none of the wardrobe changes. She treats R&B’s many eras as heritage, language, rather than costume, a fluency that guides her latest record, Pretty Idea. The album is a compact but expansive survey of the genre built on slick grooves, stacked melodies, and deep heartache.

Mark knows she’s not reinventing the wheel. When asked what inspired her latest album, she deadpanned, “Boys.” She went on to explain the record came on the heels of a return to dating after the end of a long-term relationship, but the one-word answer fits. Pretty Idea is a tight 37 minutes of disco, funk, and R&B, laser-focused on the big questions. What is love? Is it supposed to make you feel insane? Is it necessary to be happy? The familiarity of these concerns, and the sounds through which Mark explores them, is the point. Tradition is less an altar she worships at and more the point of departure for her voyage to the land beyond heartbreak.

The album is loosely structured as a wayward path to self-acceptance. Mark begins with poise, vowing on “By the End of the Night” to rebound on the dancefloor. She’s quickly swooning, swathing a new paramour in her perfume on the buoyant “ooo” and going “weak in the knees” on the sprung “Sweet Serotonin.” “Too Much” features a nifty interpolation of Usher’s “My Boo” as she second-guesses her enthusiasm. “Is it too much if I’m thinking about you daily?” she sings coyly, more to herself than her crush. By the album’s end, she’s removed enough from the doomed relationship to consider her own role in its demise. “Your touch when I’m coming home/It’s a pretty idea, a pretty idea,” she croons on the title track. “Who’s the one that did you wrong?/Maybe I did, maybe I did.”

Mark doesn’t really tell stories in her songs; she lives the turmoil, her lithe vocals tracing the flutters of the heart. Survival anthem “Problems” showcases her range, her voice variously a coo, a wail, and a feathery prayer as she tries to will away stress. Folk ballad “Cherry Reds” clings to a warm memory like an heirloom: “Smoking Cherry Reds/In the trees,” Mark trills in her smooth upper register, stretching the last word into four wounded syllables. She’s just as pained on “Let Me Love You,” where her background vocals become increasingly distressed. The sticky hook—“Why won’t you let me love you?”—is an exclamation by the song’s end.

The open spaces and pained harmonies of quiet storm are the go-to style for R&B singers working through such dark nights of the soul, but that’s one tradition Pretty Idea breaks from. The core producers—Mark, One Direction songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, and duo Two Fresh—supply a dense, full-band sound. The arrangements are shimmery and lush, every little crevice filled with (at minimum) keys, synths, rhythm guitar, and background vocals. It’s as if they’ve spackled all the negative space that defined Three Dimensions Deep. When the drums drop out on “Sweet Serotonin" and “Too Much,” finger snaps reminiscent of the days when T-Pain and The-Dream ran urban radio subtly keep the meter. And on duet “Different Places,” which channels the warped funk of For All We Know, guitar melodies swell and recede as Mark and John Ryan trade woes. “You and I/Have we fallen out of love yet?/Doing all these circles/Round around the subject,” Mark sings. These songs are retro, but they’re not stagnant.

That’s a hard balance to strike. The past goes for cheap, in spirit if not actual cost (chill, JNCO). What if all the best things have already happened? What if all the sweet serotonin your brain struggles to produce because you’re too pumped full of dread and cortisol could be solved by Alien:Earth or Supreme Clientele 2 or Toy Story 5? Pretty Idea is an album about boys, of course. But I admire its regular relationship to the past. Mark presents R&B’s archives not as sacred texts or exotic loot but as context, precedent, pearls from grandma's attic that can look nice if you style them just so. This customization is what pushes her music past pastiche. Mark's boys are all hers.

Amber Mark: Pretty Idea

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