A good friend of mine came up with a killer one liner on the new D’Angelo : when you don’t have songs you make art. Hard to deny, and for sure Black Messiah is no Voodoo –the songs aren’t there, they are all multi layered vocals on top (and inside) funk grooves where another beat replaces the melody line time after time.
It makes for bad songs but great sounds, and this is a primer on just how far sound will get you. Fourteen years after I saw D’Angelo at Radio City Music Hall, there is nothing here to catch on to the way “One Mo’ Gin” and “Untitled” could, but if you don’t need a melody, if you don’t need verse chorus verse, this is like hip hop values tethered to nascent D’Angelo songs with wall of noise tracks thrown in for taste. Recorded on two inch tape apparently the revolution won’t be digitalized.
It is all so strange yet moving, the whistling at the start of “The Door”, the up against the wall black pride politicking of “1000 Deaths” or the sonic lo fi vibrations and acoustic guitar lick of “Really Love”, are so unique it perks you up. The sounds are all over the place and it traces itself like the chalk outline he has been quoted on so much already.
“The Charade” has the intense weirdness of Sly Stone with lots of voices converging all at you at once and the sound is like that except it is as if “Everyday People” would be completely beyond him. A friend of mine mentioned Van Hunt and if you listen to Hunt’s “North Hollywood” this is exactly where D’Angelo is coming from except D’Angelo’s songs aren’t as strong though his beats are way better.
A little late for a guitar album rejuvenating r&b true but the entire Black Messiah merges into one long song with different movements, and while it doesn’t work as sweet soul music, and seems defiantly anti-populist, it does work in the way jazz can work. I’ve listened to it five times now and I can’t remember a song but if I heard 15 seconds of any track I’d know what album it was.
The problem isn’t laziness but ability, I love it but I agree with my friend, after 14 years of work it feels unfinished, the first couple of times I listened I worshipped it but the more I listened the hungrier I got for a song, at nearly an hour in length it feels like a well fitted semi-ambient wall of beats, voices, and synths, produced by Mr. Brown Sugar himself, it keeps on nearing itself to a song and missing. The first track “Ain’t That Easy” has everything but the form, it is ALL CONTENT. “Ain’t That Easy” is so close but it is unfinished and while it sounds strange to say it, after 14 years in the baking, it needs more time. It isn’t there.
So why do I love it so much: Whatever else is going on, for 56 minutes it sounds like nothing else, it is the most original album since Yeezus, it is a an off key, off kilter, deeply indebted to many people including itself, self-produced album which twinges in the moment. It neither succeeds nor fails, it is exactly what it is.
Grade: B+
