Between silk sheets and the light of the telephone reflected on her face, a woman spends the evenings in her bedroom. She is beautiful, adult and emancipated, but alone. His heart is free again, eager to get involved in the colors of life, in love and its possible pitfalls. The dramas of the past? Water under the bridge, because life, in the end, is nothing more than a continuous cycle of mistakes to be repeated until you learn something, while you wait, you might as well hang that sign on the door that signals your desire to get back into the game: “Vacancy”.
If the photo on the cover already foreshadowed an intimate and sensual content, the third album by Ari Lennox, real name Courtney Saulter, thirty-four years old from Washington DC, pursues without hesitation the revival of long playing suffused and an anodyne thread that was the prerogative of Brandy, Monica and Ashanti at the turn of the Millennium. In fact, listening comes wrapped in heavy purple-red blankets of elegance loungebutter keyboards, rhythms kept up and lyrics of love at various stages of infatuation, a sound mixture that we once called quiet storm. Even though he occasionally loses his bearings, as was perhaps predictable over fifty minutes of music, Ari manages not to totally drown in molasses thanks to his stage presence and some above-average production foresight of generalist playlist streaming.
Singles such as “Soft Girl Era”, which proves popular trend of women who aspire to a comfortable life, and “Under The Moon”, which overturns the concept of “horny”, give a good idea of a vaporous but refined listening – the first of the two follows a playful Mariah Carey-style r&b, the second sways over an elegant “diet” dub.
But “Vacancy” has many empty rooms; only in the opening, “Mobbin In DC” is accompanied by a pungent thread of jazz trumpet, while the following title track makes use of the hand of a revived Jermaine Dupri with a beat it is no coincidence that she is positioned between r&b and hip-hop like the Janet Jackson of the nineties.
Of course, the “Pretzel” acoustic dwells needlessly on a patterns eyelid-level, we could say the same of “High Key”, were it not for Ari's voice which this time hovers above the instruments with newfound passion, ringing the performance that SZA and Kehlani have been promising for years but still aren't delivering.
Between the beat well placed of “24 Seconds”, the soft electronic ideas around “Cool Down” and the references to the Sixties of Chess Records of “Horoscope” and “Hocus Pocus”, listening does not surprise or attack the casual listener, but offers the necessary reasons of interest to anyone who chews the products of the so-called panorama adult contemporary.
Of course, something more was needed, especially for a third studio album tasked with raising the profile of the author beyond the circle of fans. Ari clearly has taste, a great voice and knows how to play with her sensuality in the social era, but those who already at the time of her debut “Shea Butter Baby” (2019) glimpsed the seeds of a new Aaliyah a bit imaginatively will have to wait, still lacking that futuristic push capable of making the product alone a small event capable of shaking the foundations of the scene.
Not bad; the immaculate production balance lovers rock of “Deep Strokes” shows how little is enough for Ari to lull the listener, while on “Wake Up” the streetwise and slightly angry energy of Lianne La Havas shines, because under the elegant elegance boudoir a roaring and certainly not shy soul is hidden.
Let's hope Ari Lennox doesn't stop here, like her colleague Sabrina Claudio it would be a shame to see her endlessly reiterate the usual ideas that are the most popular among performers of her rank. In its best moments, “Vacancy” shows that it has much more to it.
02/08/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
