Maybe it’s a trite, daytime radio kind of question, but it’s one I’ve been mulling over all week, spurred by the completely elated magic of the ‘Too Late To Turn Back Now’ (holy shit, that song) club scene in Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman. Lee is a master of the dancefloor shot, often showing his protagonists singing along over the soundtrack: see the mass swimsuit gyrations of the college dance in School Daze, a film he says he created “so he could create a dance […] its called da butt!”
While UNIIQU3 - Newark’s finest, the #JerseyClubKween – clearly aims to animate a similar area of our anatomy, drawing on images and experiences of black movement, body positivity, power and grace; she does so with a radical vision of women’s self-expression, and fast-cut pace that draws bodies into movement, aswell as drawing bodies in movement. No camera required. This is what I mean by cinematic, not in the predictable music journalist sense (yawn) of conveying a landscape or scene, but in somehow threading the images of dance, movement and joyous exclamation of the dancefloor it was created for within the arrangement of the song.
It seems odd that this is UNIIQU3’s debut EP, following scores of weaponised remixes and edits, along with a hardcore tour schedule, but yep, Phase 3 is UNIIQU3’s first full EP of original material. Released by Nina Las Vegas’ NLV Records the EP sees UNIIQU3 excel as both producer and vocalist, with a low-end weight that was sometimes missing from her regular free soundcloud and wetransfer drops, mastered for the club.
TLDR: “CHEW IT UP CHEW IT UP, GO AND LET THAT BOOTY DROP”