Cold Water

You don’t get a lot of nouns you can hold in your hand on Cold Water. “Faith,” “pain,” “soul,” “love”: These you get about once a track, guideposts on an inner journey that—like most inner journeys—doesn’t end so much as deepen. A young Brooklynite with a civil engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon already under his belt, Medhane-Alam Olushola is obviously bright. He’s also a little melancholy (“Na Fr”) and possibly stoned (“Bun Down Babylon”), but hopeful nonetheless (“I’m Deadass”), a state that his songwriting—and his diligently low-key delivery—conveys with grace. And for as abstract as that writing is, the beats—hazy, grainy, gum stuck to their shoes—are evidence that for all this thinking, he remains confined by the real world. He won’t grab you by the throat, but he might get under your skin.