KAINA

One Liner:  Chicago R&B like she just kept the hooks from Chance songs

Wikipedia Genre:  No Wikipedia, but this is R&B
Home: Chicago

Poster Position: Late Addition

Weekend One Only.

Thoughts: The only two items that come up on Wikipedia are "a small hillock in Manipur sacred to Hindu," and "a village in Samastipur district."  So the name appears to be Indian in origin.  BUt the singer's actual name is Kaina Castillo, and she appears to have nothing to do with India.  Instead, she is Venezuelan-Guatemalan, and lives in Chicago.  So, there you have it.  Oh, and then one you can find under kainamusic.com, that isn't this same lady - there are apparently two artists with this exact same stage name, which is unfortunate.

Some of these tunes have a poor man's Beyonce vibe in the vocals, like "Petals" but the beat/track is more of one of those jazzy Chance the Rapper vibe pieces.  Or "What's a Girl," that sultry, breathy, a little vibrato-ish voice like Bey does at times.  There is probably a better vocal comparison, but I don't listen to much R&B pop until I work through these musicians for ACL.

One album - 2019's Next to the Sun - and it is full of soft-focus, smooth, slow jam R&B stuff.  However, her top track, by quite a bit, is from an earlier EP with someone called Bedows and someone else called Burns Twins, called Sweet Asl.  I'm sure that title has some meaning that old people like me don;t understand, like the way AF stands for As Fuck and my wife bought an eight year old some socks with Chill AF on them because she didn't know what that phrase meant.  So ASF probably stands As Super Fuck or something.  I dunno, I'm old.  Anyhoo, the song is called "La Luna," with 1.8 million streams.

Definitely has that jazzy, chilled Chance the Rapper vibe on the spare little tune/beat in the background of the track, especially once the horns kick in.  Short song too - only 2 minutes.

The top track from her new album is "Could Be a Curse," with 144k streams.

Is that dude singing in Chinese or something?  What is going on there?  These tunes are fine - I really don't care all that much for this type of laid back R&B stuff, regardless of how pretty her voice might be.  I'll pass.