Album Review: HAN
Amain Berhane a.k.a Berhana’s first full length album, HAN (2019), is a musical master class in the fusion of R&B and Pop. This extremely talented musician has had promotion from Donald Glover, in the form of musical appearance on the show “Atlanta” (as well as some other great songwriters, like Yellow Days and Flying Lotus), and Berhane himself hails from Atlanta. He took a lot of time to put this album together, about 3 years following his self-titled EP, Berhana, which came out in 2016.
The album plays smoothly, has great transitions in theme from one song to another, intermittently interrupted (and kicked off) by these interesting in-flight announcements, which kind of function as roadmaps, not unlike when you’re guiding a reader through an essay. The amount of time and dedication he put into this project shows distinctly through the great production, wonderful vocals, the bass and melodies of the songs. A few notable tracks from the album include a couple singles, “I Been (ft. Crush)” (also mentioned on my Top 10) and “Lucky Strike”, as well as “Drnuk”.
“Lucky Strike” is funky, a peppy addition to the album as a whole. It’s themes are existential, relatable, like the lyrics “Up Past midnight, Wonder where this life could go” and the chorus “We, We’re so lost”.
“Drnuk” fits its title well, with it’s lyrical content, which seems to detail a drunk fling, and it starts slow, and ends slow, but in between, it’s lively and joyous. If you’ve ever been drunk or around drunk people, it seems fitting, haha.
There are some other tracks that come to mind when I think of really interesting and good technique, like “Flashback”, which also shows his ability to switch up genre, this one is way jazzier, and the drum track on this one is really technically impressive, as well as producing just a really awesome listening experience. “I Wasn’t Told” is magical, the swelling strings just lift you up and take you away, it’s an amazingly beautiful way to close off the album.
Lucky Strike Single Cover
The whole concept and execution of the HAN is truly interesting and unique. Berhane pulled this one off nicely. My rating? 9/10. He shot for the gold, didn’t leave much room for improvement from this project. I’m interested to see what artistic style choices he opts to experiment with in the future would be.