Synth Single Review: “Stay” by 7 Rising & Mayah Camara
by Karl Magi
7 Rising & Mayah Camara’s “Stay” surges with darkness to draw images of harshness and a relationship full of shards as heaviness sits like a leaden cloud in the bass and mysterious feelings move. In a shadowy tide, 7 Rising’s voice creates a desolate sensation, the deep end full of portentous feeling above the threatening weight throbbing below. A feeling of crushing struggle is leavened by floating lights, fragile and vulnerable, while the broad-ranging vocals drop low and rise.
Mayah Camara’s voice adds a soft sweetness, creating more pain in the words. Melodically hurting notes climb in contrast to the warning underpinnings, contrasting gruffness and tenderness, while a levitating synth evokes a tide of loss as tremulous tones brush past. A stabbing emotional power drives into my gut from 7 Rising’s vocals, drawing me in, while Mayah Camara captures me with her sense of deep hurt and vibrating underlayers snarl as reverberant sounds ring.
Creaking synth slices while 7 Rising uses the full power and expressiveness of his voice to hammer his message home before hovering bells shift and the two singers create harmonic beauty before painful silence falls.
The song's subject sits very still and watches the narrator with no one else around. He says, "I taste the word 'enough' on the back of my tongue." A wall has come up between them and he adds, "There's a rule, I wrote it," that if he says stay, the other person stays and "you say nothing, I stay."
"This is how I hold you by not holding you at all," as our storyteller talks about soft hands on the wire awaiting the other person's fall. It seems that the song's subject wants him "held within your thrall," and every inch he doesn't take turns into another wall. "You say you're fine without me, your eyes betray your calm," as he feels their love quickly slip away.
In conclusion, he says, "I pull you close in my mind, push you aside with disdain. I'm gentle like a closed door, I'm kind like a king."
