Meshell Ndegéocello: Weather – review

The 10th album from Meshell Ndegéocello feels like cocooning yourself in a hotel with a lover for a week: deeply intimate, wholly engrossing. On the title track, half plea and half seduction, she elides domesticity with subtle eroticism; by La Petite Mort, she's murmuring "Who's your daddy?" in her deep husk of a voice – perfectly framed throughout the album by gently sensual arrangements of warm piano chords and tactile brushed drums. The outside world, when Ndegéocello deigns to notice it, gets short shrift: "Kick and scream and watch it burn," she observes with disgust. Ndegéocello's work has often been heavy with mood while elliptical of songcraft, but Weather contains her most direct material since the early 1990s: Dirty World struts along a ridiculously irresistible bassline, while the chorus of Change is as close as she gets to a glorious explosion of FM pop. Most revelatory is Oysters: this piano ballad softly conveys an extraordinary depth of feeling in the us-against-the-world dyad it depicts.