In “Lost One” the singer is the betrayer it’s a confession of pure despair, moaned in Sullivan’s low register over a hollowly echoing guitar, as she watches the one she cheated on have rebound affairs and begs, “Try not to love no one.” Other songs venture into trickier, more ambivalent territory.
The album track, with drums, retro-sounding strings and disorienting studio-reversed piano chords, is more dismissive and colder in its fury Sullivan flings short phrases like a knife-thrower.īut the righteous anger of a breakup is one of the album’s easier stances. The live version, with Sullivan accompanied only by electric guitar and backup singers, matches virtuosity to vehemence as she switches among long swoops, cascading runs, quick jazzy syllables and wide leaps. In the songs on “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan looks behind dismissive stereotypes - party girl, avenger, sex addict, gold digger, cheater, castoff - to show complicated human longings behind them. “Heaux” is a Frenchified version of “ho,” placing a longtime insult at an analytical distance. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.) “Heaux Tales” is schematic, a successor to didactic concept albums like “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and the visual version of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Spoken-word “tales” from six women - confessions and hard-earned observations - are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. And in case no one noticed before, her fourth and bleakest album, “Heaux Tales” - arriving five years after “Reality Show” - makes clear that her stories were never meant to be hers alone. Sullivan’s music carries the churchy, high-stakes emotionality and down-to-earth detail of vintage Southern soul into the everyday situations and electronic soundscapes of hip-hop. Her narrators don’t spare anyone who wrongs them they don’t forgive their own failings either. She opened her 2008 debut album, “Fearless,” with “Bust Your Windows,” taking revenge on a cheating boyfriend, and a few songs later, the singer ends ongoing domestic abuse with murder.
In her songs, love nearly always leads to pain: rejection, infidelity, heartbreak, violence. Jazmine Sullivan has never prettified romance.
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