“I Love You,” the opening track from Rudeyna’s new EP Queen Yapadoo, starts with beguiling simplicity; it’s a slow jam in the R&B vein, with a lazy groove, a lush organ, a floating guitar. Rudeyna’s voice, quavering but sure, enters and declares the simplest, most effective lyric in pop music: “I love you,” she sings. She sings it again, playing with it more. Shimmering keyboards, cooing background vocals, begin to destabilize things. Then a distorted electric guitar crashes in, and everything changes at once. The song reinvents itself from there, over and over.
Reinvention, however, is what the New Haven-based musician Rudeyna thrives on, having built an eclectic yet unified musical voice over several years of recording and performing. Born in Lebanon and arriving in New Haven at the age of 12, she was raised on rock and jazz, both of which and more find their way into the music she writes. An EP in 2014 featured the song “Monsters,” which managed to be giddy and menacing at the same time.
“The whole point is the rawness, the vulnerability, accessing something that’s very pure and very free,” she told the Independent in 2015. That freedom is on wild display on Queen Yapadoo. Technically it’s another EP in the sense that it has three tracks on it. But two of those tracks clock in at around six minutes, and all told, the three songs have about two albums’ worth of musical ideas packed into them.
“I Love You,” as it seesaws between pastoral bliss and disjointed confusion, grows more adventurous at each turn. Fueled by deliriously stacked vocal harmonies from Rudeyna, the band — Bill Readey on guitar, Fred DiLeone on keys, Lydia Arachne on bass, Jake Habbaeger on drums, and David Ramos on percussion — builds the song to a sweeping, cinematic peak, then falls, softly, to a chiming guitar that brings listeners back where they started, but changed along the way.
“Queen,” meanwhile, draws from its namesake. Rocking and theatrical at the same time, it features heavy guitar and keys from Readey and DiLeone, tricky odd signatures from Adrian Van der Graff on bass and Kenny Owens on drums, but most of all, dizzying vocal acrobatics from Rudeyna, who unspools a fairy tale, dark and rainbow-colored at the same time, to talk about overcoming adversity. “Come build your fire, Bright Little One / come build your fire bright,” she sings. “Then you come to the scene that you’ve seen in a dream / So you give and you reach and you wash yourself clean / Saying, ‘all, please take me all.’ / And you stand on the ground that you finally found / And so we grow.”
The album’s closer, “The Infinite Adventures of Yapadoo, The Explorer, Pt. 1 (One Step),” is its shortest track, and in some ways its most ambitious. Featuring George Lesiw on guitar, Lydia Iarocca on bass and Mike Nappi on drums in addition to Readey and DiLeone, it steps all the way into a shifting, schizophrenic jazz, jerking between a relaxed Latin feel and something darker and stranger. “One step, one step more / One to learn to love and to explore / One to learn to love and to adore,” Rudeyna sings, like a mantra, over and over again. But she keeps reinventing, redefining, recontextualizing the line, melodically and harmonically, until the last word — “adore” — ends the song in a blast of jarringly exhilarating harmony.
It doesn’t take long to listen to, but Queen Yapadoo feels in the best sense like a musical kingdom to explore, with Rudeyna as ruler and guide, jangling the keys in her hand, beckoning for us to follow.