Mista

For an all-too-brief moment in the mid-’90s, Mista seemed like a potential big-deal R&B group. Bobby Valentino, Darryl Allen, Brandon Brown, and Byron Reeder were four young men whose teenaged ’80s-baby birthdates technically qualified them for boy-band status, but broke through with a minor hit in “Blackberry Molasses” that positioned them as introspective beyond their years. That song’s themes of resilient just keep holding on secular-gospel soul-searching and its stunning ability to build widescreen vistas off a Shuggie Otis-esque rhythm-box minimalism made it a gem in the Organized Noize discography, but an outlier in Mista’s — a hard first-single/album-opener act to follow, one that wasn’t matched by the rest of the album’s less-ambitious “hey, you like Jodeci?” agreeability. But if you absolutely need to hear peak mid-decade Organized Noize ATL soul put to the service of a teenaged close-harmony R&B group, Mista makes up for its relatively ordinary songwriting through the album’s wholehearted commitment to wringing every last bit of melismatic vocal prodigiousness from its singers and enveloping them in some of the most intensely luxurious neo-soul flourishes the production unit was capable of. And in the 1996 of ATLiens and “Don’t Let Go (Love),” they were capable of anything, including making four out-of-nowhere teens sound like they’d be ruling the charts a lot longer than they got to.