D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

Ooops. Wrong link.

https://pitchfork.com/news/watch-dangelos-verzuz-battle-live-at-the-apollo-theater/

Doesnt look very verzuz!

Swizz and Timb just said on IG live that it was supposed to be D’Angelo #VERZUZ Maxwell on Valentine’s Day but it didn’t work out and D’Angelo was ready so they went this route. I loved tonight but wow that would’ve been something.

— Sylvia (@SylviaObell) February 28, 2021

Should have postponed it until both could do it. That would have been cool.

I only saw him once, early on the Voodoo tour, couple of months after the album came out. Band was about a dozen people, including Questlove, Pino and Poyser.

I saw that tour. Lot of big JB and prince style sections. Worked well for the newer songs, not so well for the brown sugar songs.

Huh, I kind of remember it differently. I remember him ripping off his shirt and racing around the theatre while singing "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker."

Lol. Not saying I wasnt thinking, wow, maybe this is what seeing JB might have been like, in 2001, but I mean, you try and make everything into a faster funk number and songs like Brown sugar and shit damn mf or lady lose some of their individuality.

there's gotta be a way to get the verzuz's as video files, right? anyone have any info on this?

There are a bunch of IG downloaders out there, I think

i wouldn't mind being pointed at them

forks et al this is on apple music now as an album... very high quality recording obv, he & the band sound amazing

well he didn't actually have a band for it, it's just him on keys + a dj playing backing tracks + a few guests here and there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfGw4LWg3ec

full performance is here

ah, well nonetheless

Good but not amazing. The show I saw on That last tour he did with a band was pretty amazing though

This really was the best album of the decade

thanks

hm, really hard to get a sense of how much of this is live based on this youtube; never a fan of backing tracks

shout out to target

meth and red tho!

It would be cool if they just said fuck it and shot in landscape mode

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

I still listen to it all the time. Total classic.

He might take forever but hes obv getting better each time out. Hoping that continues. Another life is still absolutely incredible and beautiful. I'd personally prefer if 1000 deaths didnt have the sampled speech at the start as I don't need that in my life but that track I never get bored of. Hope he keeps working with kendra foster too.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

Yes. Also, the show on this tour was the best show.

Was reviewing an album with a George Floyd-referencing track on it yesterday and thinking about how the song was totally fine, stirring and moving, but still not a patch on The Charade, and how graceful and powerful and sad that track is, while still being a gossamer-light 3 minute pop song. He's a genius. What he does is magical.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

Yes. Also, the show on this tour was the best show.

Yes to both, without question.

This not only still sounds fresh to me but it still sounds ahead of our time. There are musical and sonic layers I'm still discovering. I'm also appreciating him more as a lyricist. IDK if I can even call it a defining record bc there's nothing else like it.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive),

This really was the best album of the decade

― akm, Sunday, March 14, 2021 4:42 AM (two months ago)

yeah it's a masterpiece

i feel like even though it was so highly praised it's still underrated in some weird way?

possibly because it came out so late in the year when it was released? didn't get the chance to top all the 2014 lists and by 2015 kendrick dropped to pimp a butterfly, the other album of the decade

i think black messiah has aged better, tbh

Is it blasphemy to say that it’s his best album (so far)?

Nah, they're all classic in their own way, but Black Messiah is the one I've been reaching for since it came out.

Black Messiah is amazing but Voodoo > Brown Sugar > Black Messiah

i like this album a lot but voodoo is still the one for me, easily. i prefer brown sugar to this, as well.

or yah what murgatroid said.

last three posts otm

I don't have strong feelings about the ranking of them, but if your third best album is still the best album of the decade it came out in, that's a strong career

I prefer it to Voodoo and Brown Sugar because it's weirder and I like weird

i just prefer the smoother edges of r&b

id have to think about it but im not sure id have this in my top ten r&b releases of the last decade. trying not to poopoo on it too much cos i do like it. i just dont have near the level of reverence for it as others.

black messiah may be more psychedelic than voodoo but i don't think it's significantly weirder

Voodoo is more insular and murky and detailed (and it was my fav album for years), but Black Messiah has better songs and is a synthesis of everything that makes him great imo

idk maybe it's just because i'm always stoned when i listen to it but voodoo takes funk to such an interior space that it's a deeply weird album to me, psychedelic without literally being psychedelic bc it's pushing a form to its absolute limit and beyond xp

"but Black Messiah has better songs"

idk about all that

i think there's aspects of black messiah where i could see one gravitating to it depending on taste -- there's a darkness to it and a sort of unsettled itchiness where it's almost at once belabored and unfinished, some tracks feel like semi-thoughts where others feel so worked over that the instrumentation swallows up his vocals. on the other hand voodoo is warmer and intensely perfected, everything is in its right place even as the production makes the songs feel like the substance holding them together is almost gelatinous. of course this is its singular brilliance. personally i think voodoo is the clearly superior record and so i once again bash the button next to my computer that says "brad otm" ... i really just think it's one of the most perfect albums of all time, i can't imagine basically anyone improving upon it let alone the guy who made it. but it's cool that black messiah connects the thread while also standing on its own in a number of ways

Voodoo feels like the apotheosis of a genre that it also more or less defined. Black Messiah feels like an album that exists outside of genre and is kind of too out there and proggy and inherently sui generis to inspire a lot of similar albums. I like each for its own reason, more likely to put on BM than Voodoo though.

a lot of nice words here even when I'm not sure how much of them I agree with

i'm inclined to go with voodoo still but I listened to it so much as a teen before BM came out so I may be over/underrating them accordingly. all 3 are amazing ofc

otoh I never warmed to the godawful meth & red verses lack of which is def a point in BM's favour

ok so this album is fucking amazing

black messiah is usually my favourite but voodoo is near perfect too. i think it just comes down to black messiah being a more direct work, the songs are easier to grasp despite still being so dense.