Review: D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah

Black Messiah is ever-worked, ever-tweaked, and perfected (in its distinctively imperfect way), but soul-bearing and raw like little else.

D'Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah Immediately following a grand jury’s decision not to indict anyone in the death of Michael Brown (the first of two such outcomes involving unarmed black men killed by white cops in a two-week period), elusive R&B icon D’Angelo decided to surprise-emancipate the studio album he’d hoarded for at least a decade. Reportedly recorded on around 200 reams of analog tape, with his team still doing the math on what kind of budget that works out to, Black Messiah is ever-worked, ever-tweaked, and perfected (in its distinctively imperfect way), but soul-bearing and raw like little else. The album would be vital in any time, but in 2014, it’s downright restorative. Call its studio ethic retro-fetishism if you must, but truth is that everything about this album reaches into the past to bring us what the present needs.

The opening track, “Ain’t That Easy,” immediately establishes a more muscular ambition than D’Angelo’s millennium-greeting gumbo of midnight session jamming, Voodoo. That album represented nothing less than the zenith of the neo-soul movement, and in truth a lot more. Black Messiah has hallmarks of the same, with the church of D’Angelo vocal overdubs still a staple. A surprising amount of the album’s material throws back to his more jazz-indebted 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, but it’s also something else, something those two albums hinted might someday manifest, but playfully hid. In short, that thing is guitar. When D’Angelo released Voodoo, he reportedly didn’t even know how to play the instrument well; keyboards have always been his preference. But he adopted the axe in a continued tribute to Prince and Funkadelic, whose gonzo psychedelic opuses like Maggotbrain and Free Your Mind…and Your Ass Will Follow provide the clear blueprint for this set’s retro-meets-future funk.

D’Angelo plays the guitar like you might imagine he would: His studious practice over the last decade has allowed his expressive leads to bleed sometimes unrecognizably into the more expert ones by the Time’s Jesse Johnson and others, but there’s a lovely tentativeness, the kind that makes his falsetto so tender and appealing when he wants it to be. Even then, the album rocks, and in every moment it illuminates what’s been missing in R&B for far too long. From Frank Ocean to Miguel, Justin Timberlake to Bruno Mars, the male artists that followed in D’Angelo’s wake have intimated sex and carnality through asserting their own agency or disavowing agency altogether. D’Angelo’s rock, like his R&B (if the two can be so separated), isn’t about control, but a shared sense of vulnerability, and that ineffable quality infiltrates every attempt at emulating Prince and Eddie Hazel and makes D’Angelo’s guitar, even when he’s not the one playing it, a unique revelation.

Advertisement

The full strength of Black Messiah is felt on “1000 Deaths,” a distortion-heavy slab of locomotive rock that finds Questlove banging out the “Pharaoh’s Dance” beat over crude guitar shapes so insistent they will themselves into hooks. Johnson screeches through a shrieking banshee of a guitar solo even more wrenching, due to the sheets of borderline-noise now piled atop it, than on the circulated demo version of the track. The raised hands of the album’s cover art clenched into tightly balled fists, “Ain’t That Easy” and “1000 Deaths” form a diptych that comprises the pinnacle of Black Messiah as a guitar album.

These two songs also establish a tidy thematic conceit for the album: a cry to be remembered, to be again present and accounted for, a sentiment that extends not only to D’Angelo, reasserting himself and his career after a long leave of absence, but to those men and women who are, right now, marching through streets around the country with “Black Lives Matter” signs. “Ain’t That Easy” manifests desperation (“You can’t leave me!”), cockiness (“I got just what you need”), and honesty (“You won’t believe all the things you have to sacrifice/Just to get a piece of mind”), while “1000 Deaths” addresses the fear of disappearing entirely (“They’re gonna send me over the hill”). The former doubles as a fever dream of addiction (D’Angelo barks demonic-filtered, druggy come-ons like “Take a toke of smoke from me as you drift inside,” preying on a falsetto that meets “with a choice that you can’t decide”) or even the last vestiges of a fading romance. “1000 Deaths” opens with a sermon on “the black revolutionary messiah” sampled from The Murder of Fred Hampton and the horrors of war (“A coward dies 1000 times/A soldier only dies just once”), validating Questlove’s eager comparison to Apocalypse Now at a recent listening session for the album in New York. All this speaks to the malleability of one of this era’s great statements of artistic intent in any medium.

Among all its many interpretations and meanings, social injustice—or more broadly, the state of the black community—is key, both as the catalyst of Black Messiah’s release and the principle concern of an album not just in its lyricism (though “The Charade” is as blunt a statement on the mortal toll of enduring racism in America as you’re likely to hear), but in its musical sprawl. To call Black Messiah a great anthology of black music would be true, but limiting. The hambone-riffing “Sugah Daddy” (the finest minimalist sex jam since at least Prince’s “Black Sweat,” but likely even “Kiss”), the Les Paul-worthy fireworks of “Betray My Heart,” and the whistling cornpone of “The Door” reflect a color-blind musical heritage, which itself is progress.

Advertisement

That sounds like a heavy load to bear, but D’Angelo is as concerned with emotional variance as he is genre-inclusivity. “The Charade” may pivot on the disgusted chorus of “All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we only got outlined in chalk,” but one track later D’s sex jonz gets walked out and he’s making pussies fart (“It’s talking to ya, talking to ya, Daddy!”), complete with chorus of queefing, processed trombones. “Really Love,” Black Messiah’s lead single, is all hushed reverence: Spanish guitars, a string ensemble orchestrated by Clare Fisher’s son of all people, and possibly the most earnest, lovely D’Angelo falsetto vocal to date. One track after that we find the singer jokingly riffing on his troubled history as a sex symbol, opining, “If you’re wondering/’What about the shape I’m in?’/I hope it ain’t my abdomen/That you’re referring to.”

A lot of looser, more impressionistic sketches, genre one-offs, or prickly ruminations find themselves on Black Messiah’s second half, which is merely great rather than flat-out marvelous. “Prayer” rides the drunkest, most J. Dilla-est beat I’ve ever heard, but curiously both in its melody and lyricism stabilizes itself as a soul-gospel ballad worthy of Sam Cooke or Al Green’s Belle Album. “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” also falls in the Dilla house of drunk drumming, but serves up a stellar riff that grounds its rush of questions about the socioeconomic and environmental state of the world, tipping its hat to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” And “Another Life” again embraces the fallen Dilla in its languid, sitar-inflected groove, likening it to an elegy in the same vein as the Roots’ “Dillatude: The Flight of Titus”—a tribute to basically the only other artist whose ever shared D’Angelo’s idiosyncratic approach to rhythm.

Perhaps one or two of these could’ve been worried to the same heights of, say, “Ain’t That Easy” and “Sugah Daddy,” or replaced by some of the 10-or-so reportedly completed tracks D’Angelo and his team chose from in the two weeks they prepped for this unexpected release, but the impromptu nature of Black Messiah goes someway in complementing what is such a human, vulnerable, and yet still humblingly brilliant album. In short, it’s part of what makes it so needed. No one else could’ve delivered in this way, or at least no one has in the 15 years we’ve waited. All that time away, through all the trials and tribulations, the rise and fall and rise again that bamboozled our expectations, D’Angelo’s assuredly delivered a great album, one that, even in these nascent days of our receiving it, already feels like something that’s always been, that’s necessary, and that was probably worth any wait.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Label: RCA  Release Date: December 15, 2014  Buy: Amazon

Sam C. Mac

Sam C. Mac is the former editor in chief of In Review Online.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.