By Chinonso Ihekire

Nigerian singer-songwriter DonllyG, who records within the more subdued realms of Afropop, takes a confessional lyrical approach while delivering his vocals in a restrained manner and focusing on the specific texture of the emotions he is attempting to convey.

“Stay (Ma Lo),” the fourth track from his debut album Stories Untold, is his most accomplished piece to date. The song’s title, “Stay (Ma Lo),” is rendered in English and Yoruba respectively, and both translate to “don’t go.” The bilingualism is more than a novelty; it is the song’s dramatic axis, for the fear of departure that motivates the narrator is too heavy to be expressed in one language alone.

The production for “Stay (Ma Lo)” is the joint work of two men: Wasiu Olowa, better known as Olowave, and Bleumas.
Both men have clearly been working to one end with “Stay (Ma Lo)”. The sound they have created is unified, and, far from any sense of there being two different camps at work here, it is a fully realized and entirely purposeful record.

As the song opens the basic sound is created by a series of layered pads adding harmonic color to the bare bones of a drum pattern that’s built around a steady kick drum and off-center hi-hats moving at a mid-tempo pace. Above this the chord progressions are mostly minor and are warm, as well as melancholic, perfectly complementing DonllyG’s work on the song’s lyrics.

The melodic lines introduced throughout the song are always delivered in response to the vocalist’s delivery rather than in tandem, adding a degree of depth to the core sound of the song, and the growing accumulation of additional sounds, including a wealth of ambient space and ‘room’ detail, never quite reaches a traditional peak or ‘drop’. In fact the song is built not to peak in the way that a great deal of contemporary pop would, but to hold for as long as possible, becoming more and more beautiful with time.

What Olowave and Bleumas have done best on this record is the discipline of subtraction. In a time where a lot of production in Nigerian Afropop today is very dense with percussion and very kinetic in terms of how the different elements of the soundscapes are maxed out to create this kind of energy, this record is the antithesis of that. It is a very sparse record, it is a record with a lot of negative space, there is a lot of silence, there is a lot of room for the vocal to breathe, there is a lot of room for the listener to breathe and respond to the emotions that are being felt in the song.

The bassline is very intent on moving in a certain way but it is never in the way of the vocal. The countermelodies that are introduced in the latter half of the song are all very intent on responding to the phrasing of the vocal as opposed to just kind of singing along to it independently. On the mixing side of things, the record is for the most part a very clean record, the vocal is sitting in the center of the mix in a very intimate place, the low end is separated from the rest of the other elements of the sound, the stereo image is very wide and very open so that the production can kind of breathe within the mix.

There is one area where the mix could be a little bit stronger and that is in the upper-mid frequency range. At times the melodic synth and DonllyG’s vocal kind of occupy the same space and there is a little bit of competition between the two but it is not so to undermine the overall impact of the record.

In terms of production, one can say that the primary limitation of ‘Stay (Ma Lo)’ is that it is a fairly conservative record. The structure of the song follows a traditional path and it does not really push the boundaries of what can be done within the realm of Afropop. While this is not to say that the record is in any way poor, it merely shows that while both producers are very talented, they are still at a stage in their development where they serve the artist well but do not really bring anything to the table in terms of a distinct producer’s vision.

And while that is okay for now, it would be great to hear what they could come up with if they were to take the reins of a record and really push the boundaries of what Nigerian pop music can do. On Spotify ‘Stay (Ma Lo)’ has so far garnered over 92,000 streams in the few weeks since its release, the highest figure of DonllyG’s so far, and a testament to the fact that the singer has found his audience on his own terms.

What the record does not do is to explore new territories of the Nigerian Afropop genre nor does it make any demands on it. What it does do is to present a body of work so emotionally precise and so sonically coherent that every aspect of the record from the bilingual title to the very last fade of ambient texture is to serve one end: to express a certain feeling.

DonllyG serves up the conviction required while Olowave and Bleumas provide the foundation upon which the record is constructed. Together they have managed to create something worth your attention.