D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

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)

Voodoo > Black Messiah > Brown Sugar imo

The album has been out 24 hours!

Something about the guitar in "Betray My Heart" reminds me of Isolee "Beau Mot Plage."

i have a kind of dumb poorly-formed thought that I can't really shake -- 'Sugah Daddy' sounds like the blended style that Outkast were going for with the music in Idlewild. Which would have been a hundred times better if it sounded like this imo.

this sounds so much better on CD (and i have pretty good ipod headphones).

i can't really judge how this sounds until i've blasted it in a car with three high friends heading out into the pennsylvania wilderness

another life might be the best thing hes ever done. not sure why it wasnt on the rip i downloaded....

god, this album...

"1000 Deaths" is the one that's taken my breath away

heh

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/everyone-freaked-out-about-dangelo-black-messiah.html

one thing voodoo has over this record is the slow inexorable build toward "untitled"

in this way black messiah does function more like a sly album, a bunch of exercises that together knit an unsettled atmosphere

any reports on the how the vinyl pressing sounds?

vinyl's not out till Feb, is it?

I want it though

ah ok, i thought i read someone say they'd saw vinyl up thread....

the climax of "Another Life" is sorta "Untitled" like though

the climax of "Another Life" is sorta "Untitled" like though

as i was writing that i thought to myself that "another life" is like a tiny album

but my point is that the tension-and-release of voodoo is very specific and extreme and black messiah doesn't even go for it. to its credit i think

So today from Ben Kane, ie the engineer -- turns out Humorist/Phil's Reality of My Surroundings take wasn't far off:

1k deaths: was once told D was inspired to write the music to this directly after being blown away by a joint at a Fishbone concert.

Voodoo had that perfectly-formed-in-the-heavens quality to it that I don't think this record has, but I don't think that is a bad thing. It feels like more of a Project, and I need more time to get my mind around it. I like everything I hear on it, nothing has quite earwormed me, and I will definitely keep listening to it.

I like that I've seen every track named by someone as the standout or the one that caught their ear first.

I think Sugah Daddy is my fav so far. I'm not crazy about the maxed-out sound of Charade but I haven't heard it on a good system/good headphones yet.

this feels shaggier and more improvisational to me than voodoo. "betray my heart" starts out sounding like it could be "spanish joint part ii" but it's got other ideas, loping along, finding other riffs.

can i just reiterate, i am so happy right now.

i have got to listen to this on headphones - i am so enraptured by "sugah daddy" through to "betray my heart" but i swear my mp3s of the first two tracks must be fucked bc they still sound like total messes and i can't even seem to hear what's going on in them

i do wish his vocals were higher in the mix generally

i have no sense of any of these as SONGS yet

yeah I feel the same, they're more like really elaborate jams

i also need a lyric booklet so badly because i can make it approx five lines on the whole album and this is a BARRIER to me