D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

tbh "Tutu" is the one track on this that's kind of been slipping by me entirely

xp yeah this definitely reminds me of something I've said about the Shabazz Palaces albums, which is that they sound like entirely different albums on any given system (which I wouldn't say of the much less dense Voodoo)

https://medium.com/cuepoint/nyu-music-professor-gives-dangelo-an-a-beeae902f782

Quite simply, what sets this record aside from anything else that’s come out in the past ten years is the level of musicianship and research that went in to it. Why does it sound so fresh? Because no one in R&B can make a record at this level anymore.

The industry’s shift to cut-n-paste style production since D’Angelo last released an album has had a profound effect on the music-loving public’s collective attention span. Whereas the Dr. Luke and Max Martin type of pop songs all but scream “here comes the chorus” (or, in some cases, “the drop”), we must actually pay attention to Black Messiah to recognize its subtle, hidden structures, something many listeners who came of age in the days and years since Voodoo simply don’t know how to do.

First and foremost what sets this record apart from anything else in the past decade is its rhythm. While being as danceable as any contemporary four-on-the-floor, boots-and-pants EDM-style pop hit, Black Messiah does something that those records don’t: It swings. My colleague Jason King has written at length about the unique “out-of-jointness” of D’Angelo’s groove on Voodoo — influenced in many ways by hip-hop and especially by the off-kilter rhythmic work of J Dilla. It’s one thing to adjust notes in relationship to the beat when you’re on a computerized digital workstation. It’s quite another thing to pick up your instrument and make that happen like these guys do. On Black Messiah, the musicians return fire and then some.

Coming as it did — a total surprise — a lot of folks have been compelled to offer their thoughts about Black Messiah upon first listen, especially because, well, it’s their job to do so. But Black Messiah is the kind of record that reveals itself almost as slowly as D’Angelo works in the studio. To really hear its sonic complexity takes at least five listens. To get your head around what your ear is hearing takes ten. To get your heart around what your head deciphered takes at least fifteen. To finally realize the type of earwormy, sing along-ishness that it took all of eight measures for you to get from Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” takes even more listens still. In this way, Black Messiah blossoms like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Radiohead’s Kid A or Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.

Because no one in R&B can make a record at this level anymore.

oh let us NOT do this

the muso talk in this thread has made for the most boring bits of it, the muso skill on the album is maybe its least exciting aspect, the muso exceptionalist praise can DO ONE

Hah that last paragraph smh

it's just like an indie record!

quite simply

haha hook line and sinker.

" To finally realize the type of earwormy, sing along-ishness that it took all of eight measures for you to get from Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” takes even more listens still."

BOOM TAYLOR K.O

Still waiting for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to blossom, is it supposed to give off that weird odor?

"I'm a music professor" reviews are the worst obv

Distrust anyone who uses "first and foremost"

both punctuation and thought missing here:

The melodies and lyrics on Black Messiah roll out in spectacular fashion. These aren’t nursery rhymes people. They are a higher form of expression.

The neo-soul Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is here.

yeah these reviews by musicians who know what they're talking about really suck

nah he doesn't tho cuz only took me 13 listens to get my heart around it

This album swings like Broken Social Scene

We are all nursery rhymes people

in my world of nursery rhymes people

That guitar intro on really love is mf gorgeous

on the one hand lol & wtf at concluding on "this record's so good...it's like wilco or radiohead"

on the other hand lol forever at people who start to fume as soon as somebody wants to talk about musicianship, forever imagining some phantom muso orthodoxy. it is nice to hear a record with people playing their asses off. it's fucking novel.

Lol did u read the musicianship discussion itt?

also, people have been known to play their asses off. not particularly novel if you spend any time with jazz, metal, classical, prog, funk, avant-whatever...

I'VE BEEN WAITING YEARS FOR A NEW MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD ALBUM

Just wanna say the thing about playing this record loud is really true, I feel like it finally fully revealed itself to me when I was driving around alone at night blasting it.

dancing around the kitchen to this is highly recommended fyi

I'm not very knowledgeable on the engineering side of things, but I feel like there is something less "crowded" about this record when it is played loud, as though turning up the volume gives each sound more space.

^^^

xgau:

Comparisons to Sly’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On pertain—like that end-of-year funk bombshell, this music is disruptive, a little forbidding. But a-b the two albums and recall or discover how much cleaner music was supposed to sound in 1971. Proudly antidigital though he may be, D’Angelo knows damn well that he’s competing in a funk soundscape epitomized for the nonce by the dense computerized pastiche of Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—a soundscape in which gearhead murk and gorgeous complexity coexist a tweak or two apart. His response, almost as far from Voodoo as Riot was from Stand!, is a thick, sui generis jazz-funk in which Questlove and Pino Palladino avant around with the kind of bottom they already change up as flexibly as anyone in the pop sphere while guitarist Isaiah Sharkey and horn maestro Roy Hargrove interject from the jazz side. Instrumentally, it’s more virtuosic, more surprising, more conceptual, and more physical than Riot’s “Africa” jams. But D’Angelo isn’t just being conceptual when he buries his murmurs, moans, pleas, regrets, and imprecations so deep in the mix that the words are indecipherable, because not a song here stands as tall as “Family Affair,” “Just Like a Baby,” or “You Caught Me Smilin’.” Which is to say that the talk about how profoundly D’Angelo articulates his racial awareness and romantic struggle is mostly guff, although both are certainly present. I’m very glad this album finally came. But I also very much hope there are more. Because it’s distinctly possible that he has more to tell us. A MINUS

actually pretty much aligned w/my feelings

I think Christgau is right to an extent, but I also think those songs were very much written as *The Singles* and I don't think Black Messiah clearly has a *single*, and I'm not sure he was under any external or internal pressure to make one. And they also happen to not be my favorite tracks on Riot.

Yeah, there's something sort of neat about the D'Angelo album dropping as an album-as-album with no concession to singles. It's just a slab or whatever it is, with no illusion that it is some potential crossover vying for mass attention a la Kanye.

Do you really think "Just Like a Baby" and "You Caught Me Smilin" were conceived as singles? (Only one of them was, btw - "Smilin" was the third single off the album and its release as a single may have been an afterthought.) Maybe there's some history I don't know, but "Family Affair" or the Little Sister 45s on Stone's label sound much more like tracks that might have been conceived as singles to me than those two.

the stone flower version of "just like a baby" is catchy as fuck. he just slowed it down into a total knot of anxiety on riot

fwiw, You Caught Me Smilin' and Runnin' Away were singles, it turns out, but not Just Like A Baby

That xgau review sucks

agreed.

i sort of think the opposite, that d'angelo burying his voice so deep in the mix disguises how great some of these songs are, particularly in the middle stretch. (i don't think this is wholly a positive, but neither am i mad that i had to dig before they clicked.)

like everything from "really love" through to "betray my heart" basically has a pretty immediate melody, even if he just sounds like he's mumbling it

yeah in some ways i think this is more of a melody-over-groove album than Voodoo's frequent stretches of groove-over-melody

I suppose I'm in that teeny tiny minority that cherishes Xgau reviews even when I'm in full disagreement with him, which I'm not in this case.

yeah even after 14 years there are stretches of voodoo that i always love listening to but that i can't strictly recall how they go ever. after a month with black messiah that's not the case at all

i'm with lex on this

If anything's gonna make my 2015 it'll be "Prayer."

"Babies Making Babies" is post-murk Sly. I prefer Fresh to TARGO myself.

Me too, though I grew up with the European CD mix of Fresh, which feels a little murkier than the original mix.

I love the vocals on this album, though, these infinitely multi-tracked clusters of vocal fragments that sound like gossamer. Like sometimes they're so diffuse they're barely there (but still definitely there), and sometimes they blossom so strong, like on Another Life, which is currently my favourite song. I've been listening to the album a lot in my car over the break, and I keep looking up to the stereo on the dashboard to see what track is currently playing, because they're mostly still numbers and not titles to me, and for me that's a good sign - that with regular play individiual songs are slowly revealing themselves from the greater whole.

Sasha Frere-Jones

lex otm upthread

all of these new songs have very distinct vocal bits/melodies/arrangements that are sticking with me