Countless artists have delivered angry kiss-offs to an ex, but actor-director-musician Terence Nance’s Vortex gets granular on the subject. The album, released under the moniker Terence Etc., examines the rewards and pains of an on-again, off-again relationship, punctuated by spoken narration by late character actor Reg E. Cathey and Nigerian-British artist Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze from Nance’s 2012 feature film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. On “(S)he Forgets,” Cathey likens love to filmmaking: “You have been making the movie for so long now that you struggle to remember what happened…Luckily you are reminded by the editing process which forces you to look at her.” While “cinematic” has become a cliché in music criticism, Vortex certainly qualifies as such.
The album embraces a maximalism inspired by 1970s R&B and jazz fusion. Half of the tracks run longer than five minutes, and even the shorter songs include multiple sections. In less than three minutes, “Terence’s — Love” transforms from anxious and skittering to soft and mellow, aided by harp and saxophone. A tendency toward drift is central to Vortex: Nance has cited Stevie Wonder’s seminal 1973 album Innervisions as an influence, but the music itself eschews overt references, looking to the past without simply reproducing it.
“I’m choking on my clichés,” Nance sings on “The Merchant of Flatbush,” but he does a fine job avoiding them. Throughout the album, Amanze represents the female perspective though her narration, and while Vortex harbors a degree of regret and ambivalence toward women, Nance often points a finger at himself. “Sanity Envy” lays out of the perils of fantasizing about how much better things could have been every time Nance sees his ex—or an abstraction of her. Even on the album’s opening title track, he yearns to “find a way out of her before it’s too late,” then immediately contradicts himself by looking for a path back.
The two-and-a-half minutes of spoken word that end the aforementioned “The Merchant of Flatbush” may blunt Vortex’s momentum, but even that excess adds to the verisimilitude that Terence Etc. is devoted to conjuring. The album is designed to feel as overwhelming to the listener as the emotions it lays bare. On “Infinice or Infinity?” Amanze lists “comfort zones” as one of the things she opposes. Vortex follows that credo, and it largely pays off.
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