D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

its made my day in fact), but not one that really merits the 15 year lay off

tbf this is not the sort of thing an artist plans

needs more ticker tape

anyway, if you forget all the external stuff, its bloody good. he better release an album every year from here to 2020 though.

I'm not interested in albums explaining/answering "questions" about the artist

its only the vocals that sound like riot, and 1000 deaths. every time someone does a weird/vaguely 'dark' soul record, riot is the standard comparison. in atmosphere, voodoo was much closer to riot than this one. i dont think it sounds that much like recent bilal as recent bilal has been all over the place (not in a bad way... bilal should actually get more attention than he does...). the second half of this is pretty fabulous.

― StillAdvance, Monday, December 15, 2014 4:13 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, bilal & riot both seem like pretty reasonable points of comparison to me. like, in what way is it not? i don't think it's THAT dark of a record, it's not the darkness that is of a piece w/ riot, more the graininess of the textures & the exultation of it

and it's that kind of deconstructed classicism that's in bilal records like "Sirens II"

the darkness of riot has always been way overstated to me. i blame it on greil marcus and wanting to project a shit load of stuff onto sly/riot than wasnt always warranted. sure, riot is kinda dark, but to me its always been more bittersweet, wry, sardonic, cynical than properly DARK. theres still humour in there... i.e. its not dance to the music, but its still SLY. yes hes drunk (id call it a drunken record before i would a dark one actually) and high. but he didnt turn into a nihilist. anyway, dangelo layers and mixes and arranges his vocals in a way bilal doesnt tend to (unless youre talking sally or fast lane). more recent bilal (iirc) has been more about him just being one of the greatest, most graceful, emotive singers of the last ten years. dangelo buries his voice in the songs, and he does it beautifully, but dangelo is a hider, in the tradition of hendrix, or lennon, bilal places his vocals where they would normally be expected to be. i dont hear black messiah being as broken or weird as nu amerykah.

the darkness of riot has always been way overstated to me. .... sure, riot is kinda dark, but to me its always been more bittersweet, wry, sardonic, cynical than properly DARK.

totally agree w this. it's not a Black Sabbath record.

the darkness of riot has always been way overstated to me. i blame it on greil marcus and wanting to project a shit load of stuff onto sly/riot than wasnt always warranted. sure, riot is kinda dark, but to me its always been more bittersweet, wry, sardonic, cynical than properly DARK. theres still humour in there... i.e. its not dance to the music, but its still SLY. yes hes drunk (id call it a drunken record before i would a dark one actually) and high. but he didnt turn into a nihilist. anyway, dangelo layers and mixes and arranges his vocals in a way bilal doesnt tend to (unless youre talking sally or fast lane). more recent bilal (iirc) has been more about him just being one of the greatest, most graceful, emotive singers of the last ten years. dangelo buries his voice in the songs, and he does it beautifully, but dangelo is a hider, in the tradition of hendrix, or lennon, bilal places his vocals where they would normally be expected to be. i dont hear black messiah being as broken or weird as nu amerykah.

― StillAdvance, Monday, December 15, 2014 4:57 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have no idea who greil marcus is but riot is one of the darkest albums

Quite an album, I'm enjoying it greatly. More fond of the back half.

people WANT riot to be darker than it really is

as if music that isnt, simply isnt important otherwise

there are actually moments that are darker on a whole new thing, the first sly record, songs that are much deeper and far more angry

and yeah, my first reaction was TOTALLY bilal. I need to dive back into his stuff soon.

i think its kinda fucked up how bilal, despite releasing a steady string of albums, that havent always been worthy of his talent, gets about 1/10th of the love that dangelo get. but i realise this isnt the place for that. suppose hes just one 'weird' and 'dark' album away from having more people check for him!

i meant 'that havent always been worthy of his talent, but have still contained some seriously sublime moments'

nah, i see what he means. this is basically a GREAT 3rd dangeloMBV record (and one of my favourites this year, its made my day in fact), but not one that really merits the 1520 year lay off. its an album that could very easily have followed voodoo Loveless in 2002 or thereabouts. if someone told me it was a lost album from 2002 i wouldnt be at all surprised. which is what makes it both great and a bit 'oh'.

lol yes MBV is what i keep thinking of too. and i love that album, though for all that album's much hyped jungle-shoegaze (junglaze?) direction, which i think they did BRILLIANTLY btw, speaking as a jungle/D&B fan, you could substitute 1000 deaths as a premise for what black messiah might have been.... (and was supposed to have been, though i should know better than to trust questlove, whos like the least reliable commentator for any record he works on). i think MBV actually IS perfect, and 80% of BM is perfect too, but i just wonder how much of that tinkering really made a difference. shields and dangelo have some sort of OCD/hoarding issues they might need to work on.

The mbv record largely went in one ear and out the other for me, though I've never been a My Bloody Valentine disciple. I'm not historically a D'Angelo disciple either, but something about the timing of this record and the sound of it and not having any real expectations and then getting blown away makes Black Messiah SO much more important to me than mbv was.

i like MBV more than loveless, though thats prob cos i wasnt into loveless when it came out. i WAS very into voodoo when it came out (though badu's mamas gun is STILL the better album of the two), but i still think this new one is actually an improvement in several ways.

I'm already to declare this better than MBV, and I say this as a) someone who's a big MBV fan and loved that album, and b) someone who is new to D'Angelo. (When he was initially popular I wasn't into his style of music.)

i dunno if i can go that far, though i am digging this & still kinda figuring it out. Voodoo feels infintely more subtle and like, deft, or something—not inherently superior but a more interesting approach to me—here's there's definitely a letting the accidental contrasts happen of live musicianship going on, a less precise approach

i keep wondering if the fact prince released some new albums this year made dangelo finally give this thing in.

bilal's recent work is nowhere near this daring or expansive... and i LIKE bilal

I dunno, Prince has never really stopped releasing albums. Just for some reason people were paying attention to Prince this year.

xp Black Messiah probably more painstakingly crafted but i don't see how its that much more daring or expansive than "A Love Surreal"

skipped the part where people started talking about MBV but this isn't better than voodoo lol

viny's on sale now btw https://twitter.com/TheDangelo/status/544638668347281408

ah shit

well I wasn't gonna wait til February

given the emphasis on live musicianship it's crazy this album doesn't sound more conservative, the production and arrangements are super dense and detailed

Had a fair bit of time to tinker

well yeah

so happy the vinyl is not $45 like the new MBV

airtights revenge has some pretty unusual touches and interesting chords throughout, more than a love surreal actually.

True. My brain thinks Airtights Revenge is a lot older than it actually is for some reason.

love surreal feels WAY less weird to me than black messiah
bilal feels less funky than d to me these days as well
i like LS a great deal tho'

like bilal is more on the sananda matreiya tip; proggier

Proggier is definitely otm. Also I guess a lot of what makes A Love Surreal scan as weird to me is in how he uses his voice. Less tight and controlled than usual, almost eerie and haunting at times.

that's otm. i think of bilal as the spirit of jazz haunting r&b

Lol at the Grantland "I wish this were an imaginary shitty album instead of a good album that actually exists"

isnt he just saying he wished he'd gone for a diff paradigm instead of competing w/ his older work idk makes sense to me

i wish the d'angelo album wasnt a d'angelo album etc

kid d'a

voodoo is much better. but this is still super nice

I actually thought of Kid A while listening to this for the first time, with "1000 Deaths"/"Really Love" and "National Anthem"/"How to Disappear" as first-half tonal disparity twins

not even d'angelo can escape without a radiohead reference :(

sorry :(

well someone invoked Pomplamoose upthread so it can only get better, surely

I've always liked Voodoo, but some people itt obviously LOVE it to a degree I've never managed to reach. For me, Black Messiah pushes some buttons that Voodoo doesn't (noisier production, more devil in the details, etc). I can't fault someone who's loved Voodoo for the last 15 years for saying this isn't quite as good, but it's continuing to kick my ass all over the place.

1,000 Deaths sounds SO much better on my stereo at home. I was listening to it mostly in my car today which has a pretty shitty sound system and all I could hear was distorted bass, it just sounded like soup

so much better at home!

Loving the hell out of "Back to the Future Part 1"

― Tim F, Monday, December 15, 2014 5:14 PM (5 hours ago)

this song is so killer

voodoo is one of my favorite albums of all time and uh idk if i'm ready to suggest black messiah is better or worse than it

for the most part imo it does different things

Agree with every word of Johnny and Brad's posts above. For me distinguishing itself from Voodoo was the biggest prerequisite for this album's success, and it more than accomplishes that. (Also helps that this album differentiates itself in all the right ways imo; everything I loved about Voodoo is represented here, along with a crapload of surprises and innovations)