Just Before You Hit The Ground

SoundSpecies featuring Ahu “Can We Call It Love?”

There’s not a lot of love in Ahu’s voice. She sings with a cold, severe affect that makes her sound removed and defensive, as though she’s trying to dress herself up in some sort of emotional armor. The tone of the track is similarly harsh and distant — the song is built upon a tense, sexy groove, but the arrangement feels almost excessively paranoid and claustrophobic, as if to suggest that she’s secretly hoping that the answer to the question “Can We Call It Love?” is an emphatic NO. I hear a lot of emotions mixed up in this song — fear, exasperation, bitterness, pride, regret — but barely a trace of affection, despite some words implying a bond between the singer and the person she is addressing. Whatever it going on between them, the feelings are intense, but it certainly doesn’t doesn’t seem pleasant.

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