Dec. 17--"Shut your mouth off and focus on what you feel inside," D'Angelo sings at the outset of his third album, "Black Messiah" (RCA), which arrived unexpectedly this week. He heeds his own advice, with his vocals often buried, distorted or murmured as much as sung on his first full-length studio release since 2000. He sings beautifully, often in falsetto, but just as often his voice is another instrument, a texture, a series of tones that blends with a musical landscape of shadows and rhythm.
When last heard from on "Voodoo," the then-25-year-old artist escaped the relatively safe cocoon of the neo-soul movement he helped launch five years earlier. Instead of soul traditionalism with a twist, "Voodoo" plunged into murkier, riskier waters. It offered a new take on funk: angry but subtle, raw but sensual, black-lit but hypnotic. It was an album that hovered like smoke, that rippled from the ground up. To some, it sounded alien and forbidding, lacking the readily discernible hooks that had defined the artist's earlier music. Either way, it represented a bold leap beyond his 1995 debut, "Brown Sugar."
"Voodoo" ended up selling more than 1.7 million copies, fostered an ecstatically received tour, and then ... nothing. D'Angelo went so underground that he might as well have vanished, and each sighting -- a cameo vocal here, a rare concert appearance there -- renewed waves of speculation about his health and the reasons for the follow-up album's delay.
After years of rumors, false takes and aborted studio sessions, "Black Messiah" miraculously doesn't sound overcooked. It's as if D'Angelo spent all that time building tracks up and then editing them down to their raw, spontaneous-sounding essence. Like "Voodoo," it explores funk in the raw and twisted tradition of Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On," Funadelic's "Maggot Brain," Miles Davis' "On the Corner," Prince's "Sign O' the Times" and Fishbone's "Truth and Soul." Grime still clings to the outer edges of these songs, no matter how layered they might be. D'Angelo uses his voice like an orchestra, his wordless harmonies sculpted into a horn section over the syncopated hand claps and bouncy piano of "Sugah Daddy." Horns and voices swap roles with jazzy fluidity on "Betray My Heart" and a whistled melody ambles through "The Door." "Another Life" brims with interlocking vocal lines, lined with satin but sometimes as coarse as burlap.
Despite the almost casual exterior, approximating the informality of a late-night jam session among friends (including drummer James Gadson, the Roots' Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson and master bassist Pino Palladino) the album is anything but. It teeters between big themes, love and war.
In the liner notes, D'Angelo says the title of "Black Messiah" isn't a boast, but a statement about how people of color live in a post-Ferguson, post-Arab Spring, post-Occupy Movement world. The tone is set on "1000 Deaths," with a preacher describing how the "revolutionary messiah" overcame temptation in the desert. Its tactile, skin-crawling bass feeds a guitar solo that screams to break free from the treacherous undercurrent. It slips into the deceptively breezy "The Charade," with its shattering observation: "All we wanted was a chance to talk, 'stead we only got outlined in chalk."
Anger morphs into a wobbly "Prayer," which continues the story of the "revolutionary messiah" who encounters a roadblock at every turn. "I believe that some day we will rise," D'Angelo sings, but he doesn't sound particularly optimistic. A similarly woozy despair pervades "Till It's Done (Tutu)," which fires off with a drum roll before floating dream-like over watery keyboards and ever-lurking bass. "Where do we belong, where do we come from?" the prodigal R singer wonders, as if speaking for a tribe of nomads still searching for a home.
"Black Messiah"
D'Angelo
3.5 stars (out of 4)
greg@gregkot.com
