Playin' Me is the debut studio album of British UK funky musician Merissa Campbell, known by her stage name as Cooly G. It wasn't until more than a year before the release of Playin' Me that Campbell began work on a full-length debut album as suggested by Hyperdub founder Kode9. Previously-released cuts including "Up in My Head," "Landscapes," and "It's Serious" appeared on the album's final track listing.
Playin' Me was produced with the programs Ableton Live, FL studio, and Logic Pro. While mostly written and produced by Campbell herself, the album also features collaborations with Arethis (Aaron Carr), producers P. L. Stanislas-Renouf, known by his stage name as Simbad, and Karizma. It maintains the same sparse structure and UK funky styles of Cooly G's previous records. In using minimal arrangements, the LP is focused on tension and testing the listener's patience through the use of certain sounds coming in and out of the mix at random. A Pitchfork critic categorized it as "music that knocks you over with a feather" where so much goes on despite its quiet, scarce, and understated structure.
Playin' Me is a much more lyric-focused record than Campbell's previous DJ-set-suitable releases. The album is based on her feelings from a worsening relationship she was in since 2005 when her first son was born. It goes through different moods and the messages are often uninterpretable and contradict with the vibe of the music, indicating the main female character in the LP's relationship story feels disorientate. Playin' Me was also noted by some journalists to be about the culture and lifestyle of London.
Released in July 2012 by Hyperdub, Playin' Me garnered critical acclaim; numerous reviewers praised Cooly G for being able to create a great and unique full-length record, a goal not many dance and dubstep producers were able to achieve. Common highlights in reviews were its lyrics and how the LP mixed together multiple genres. However, some writers also criticized the inclusion of Cooly G's cover of "Trouble," a song by English rock band Coldplay. Playin' Me was in the top 50 of numerous year-end lists by publications such as The Guardian, Gigwise, and The Wire. Time Out London and Fact put it in the top ten on their lists, Fact later ranking it at number 100 on their list of the best LPs of the first half of the 2010s.
History
Merissa Campbell spent the first 15 years of her career releasing only singles and EPs. "Up in My Head" / "Phat Si" was issued by Hyperdub on 6 August 2010.Macpherson, Alex (6 August 2010). "This week's new singles". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Retrieved 22 August 2017. Hyperdub then issued the single "Landscapes" / "It's Serious," on 3 November 2011.Rothlein, Jordan (3 November 2011). "Cooly G – Landscapes". Resident Advisor. Retrieved 22 August 2017. Music journalists gave the single favorable reviews upon its release,Reynaldo, Shawn (10 November 2011). "Cooly G "Landscapes" b/w "It's Serious"". XLR8R. Retrieved 22 August 2017. though they felt that the music took multiple plays for the listener to get into it.Finlayson, Angus (11 November 2011). "Cooly G: Landscapes/It’s Serious". Inverted Audio. Retrieved 22 August 2017. "Landscapes" also received an official music video that was summarized by XLR8R as "psychedlic video feedback of the producer's singing visage [that] fills the screen with pinks, purples, and other warm hues."Fallon, Patric (2 November 2011). "Video: Cooly G "Landscapes (feat. Simbad)"". XLR8R. Retrieved 23 August 2017. It was until Hyperdub founder Kode9 gave Campbell the idea to produce and release an album that she started making an LP during her free time from touring.
Taking more than a year to finish, Playin' Me was produced with the programs Ableton Live and Logic ProCrowell, John (28 September 2012). "Cooly G". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved 21 August 2017. as well as controllers such as Ableton's Launchpad and the Korg Kaoss Pad. Most of the tracks are recordings of freestyle performances and were completed in under an hour. Her son made vocal engineering contributions to some of the LP's final tracks. Out of 20 tracks she produced for the album, ten made it to the final track list although "He said I said", "Come into My Room", and "Good Times" were Produced entirely by Arethis (Aaron Carr) despite having featuring credits that were acknowledged later on digital copies of the Album. The tracks "Sunshine" and the Coldplay cover "Trouble" feature production by the artist Arethis as well. "Up in My Head," "Landscapes," and "It's Serious" are also on Playin' Me. The album first became available via streaming on 10 July 2012."Cooly G – ‘Playin’ Me’ (album stream)". Dummy. 10 July 2012. Retrieved 21 August 2017. It then premiered on Hype Machine on 16 July 2012"Cooly G – Playin' Me: Album Premiere". Hype Machine. Retrieved 21 August 2017. before Hyperdub released it in digital stores and on physical format on 17 July 2012.
Lyrical themes One difference of Playin' Me from past Cooly G records, which consisted of sounds and structures more suited for live DJ sets,"Q&A: Cooly G". CMJ. 23 July 2012. Retrieved 21 August 2017. is that it is much more lyric-focused. Campbell explained that Playin' Me primarily has themes about a worsening relationship, which were based on Campbell's own experiences of being in one from as early of 2005 when her first son, Nas, was born."JP" Patterson, Joseph (19 July 2012). "Discovery: Cooly G". Interview. Brant Publications. Retrieved 21 August 2017. However, some critics also noted Playin' Me to be about the culture and lifestyle of London, a portion of the album's songs having stories about riding a bus home late at night, finding partners in a club, and going "down the street" with friends.
As Campbell explained, "I was just going through all these emotions and thinking about loads of things and while I was going through that I was doing the album. [On] the track, "Trying," I was angry one night and I was crying and that tune came out. So it was that kind of vibe." In addition to garnering serious emotions from her relationship, she also became very tempestuous from watching the news. An example of this is "What This World Needs Now," a song based on Campbell's feelings towards the 2010 Haiti earthquake; the title of the song was conceived by his husband. Nate Patrin of Pitchfork labeled the album's lyrics as "evocative without shutting out the possibility of some elusive subtext."
The relationship on Playin' Me starts with "He Said I Said," where an unnamed male tells the main character of the story, Cooly G, to relax at his home. By "What This World Needs Now," the male takes control of her. Mike Newmark of PopMatters described the song as a "confusing track—seductively, maddeningly so—made no clearer by the title implying that love, sweet love, will make everything all right." He analyzed the track's "chords that throb atop the slick double-time beat imply not love, but sex—erotic, confounding, destabilizing sex." By the piano-driven "Come into My Room," Cooly G becomes too weak to not accept her partner's sexual advances.
Playin' Me mostly shows its main character feeling disorientate, the clearest indication of this coming from when she sings on "Trouble," "Oh no, I see / A spider web, it's tangled up with me / And I lost my head / The thought of all the stupid things I said." To represent this, the record goes through several different moods, and most of the messages of the song's lyrics are uninterpretable and often contradict with the mood of the instrumental. On "Sunshine," Campbell sings the refrain "You bring me sunshine," but the music "evoke[s] a cloudy, restless ambivalence," wrote Newmark. As Newmark described "Trying," it "emphasizes two words that speak of struggle—"trying" and "crying"—yet the music undulates with cathartic bliss that brings to mind the elysian soundscapes of the gone-too-soon trip-hop group Povi."
Music Playin' Me maintains the same minimal arrangement of synthesizer sounds and UK funky styles that defined previous Cooly G's previous releases.Truss, Si (16 July 2012). "Chatterbox: Cooly G". XLR8R. Retrieved 21 August 2017. The vocals and sparse style of the LP was compared by critic Will Ryan to the self-titled debut albums of Emika and Nina Kraviz. Patrin described the LP as mainly including a "juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines" and wrote that it touches on several genres to the point where "its personality's better defined by its moods than any genre affiliations." Journalist Martin Clark categorized Playin' Me as a "broken dub house" record due to its use of "delayed percussive touches, subby basslines and wistful Detroit pads."Clark, Martin (18 June 2012). "Cooly G: Playin Me". Fact. The Vinyl Factory. Retrieved 22 August 2017.
Patrin labeled the content of Playin' Me as "music that knocks you over with a feather" where so much goes on despite its quiet, scarce, and understated structure. The album is very focused on tension and testing the patience of the listener; synthesizer sounds play at random moments,Samuels, A. J. (4 November 2012). "“They were strangers to me before, innit” – A.J. Samuels in London with Cooly G". Electronic Beats. Retrieved 21 August 2017. and, as Clark described, various types of drum rhythms are used, ranging from "driving to scattered and beatless." The most disordered and harshest song on the album is "Is It Gone?". Ari Spool of Tiny Mix Tapes wrote that it contains "broken-up, repetitious vocals and watch-alarm tweets, [...] and you can envision Cooly pressing MPC pads and feeling out the rhythm organically." While some reviewers described Playin' Me as a vocal record, Newmark disagreed with this categorization and analyzed the LP is about how the musical content "interacts" with the lyrics Campbell sings and "provides us with necessary information." His example for this was the title track, which involves her singing only the words "Playin’ Me" throughout, but the mood of the instrumental changes from "disbelief to anger" in the middle of the song's runtime.
Categorizing the style of Playin' Me as a mixture of mainstream club music and experimental dark pop, musicOMH critic Martyn Young wrote that it has a "slightly strange ghostly vibe" and a "sense of mystery and portent," with "the songs floating along on a distended ethereal plane." As Ryan analyzed, "the record is never straight-up ambient, but some of its most compelling material, on tracks like "Come into My Room" or "Good Times," is a loose assemblage of beats, synths, and organic instrumentation bleeding together like runny watercolors." Patrin highlighted the LP's "sly dynamic" in the way each track is mixed: "if you want to really get a good sense of how she lets the snares play against each other, you need to push the volume up into the red. At that point, the bass will flood even more of your ear-space, while still sounding more warm than abrasive-- it doesn't rattle subwoofers, it melts them."
Vocals