FEATURE:
Second Spin
D'Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah
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IN this feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Harris
I urge people to check out an album on C.D. or vinyl that is either underrated and deserves new love, or it is a great album you do not hear much. If neither option is possible, go and stream that album at the very least. This instalment is reserved for an album that was hugely applauded when it came out. In fact, D'Angelo and The Vanguard’s Black Messiah was my favourite album of 2014. Released on 15th December that year – and it rare to get a year-best album come out that late! -, it came fourteen years after the phenomenal Voodoo. D’Angelo unveiled the album at a New York listening party. Like Prince and his New Power Generation, D’Angelo made a big returns with The Vanguard. There are options to buy Black Messiah. In any case, one of the best-regarded albums of the 2010s definitely should be played more across radio. I wonder if that is the final album we will hear from D’Angelo. He did release a single, Unshaken, in 2019 - though there has been no news of a fourth studio album. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for the masterpiece that is Black Messiah. There are so many five-star reviews for an album from one of music’s absolute greats. That is no surprise! It is D’Angelo’s most immediate and varied collection of songs. Without a weak moment (though I have seen some view Really Love as a bit too routine and unambitious) through the album, it sounds as essential and necessary now as it did back in 2014. Recorded between 2002 and 2014, this is an album that shows its working. Though it is loose and funky at times, I feel it is a very precise album with so much detail.
D'Angelo’s ‘Vanguard’ includes Questlove, bassist Pino Palladino, guitarist Isaiah Sharkey, and horn player Roy Hargrove. Favouring an analog sound that puts it alongside some of the great Soul albums of the 1970s, I think that works wonders. It makes Black Messiah sound more urgent, silky and vintage. Even though it was a success in the U.S., Black Messiah didn’t chart all that high in the U.K. and many other nations. I wonder why that is. Maybe people were not expecting the album or it enjoyed steady sales after a while. I remember buying it the week it came out and instantly being moved by it. It remains one of my favourite albums from the past ten years. Multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter D'Angelo showed the full range of his abilities through Black Messiah. I hope, decades from now, people will remember this as one of the all-time great albums. For that reason, I wanted to shine new light on it – to ensure that it is being played and reaches new people. On its fifth anniversary in 2019, Albumism showed love for the mighty Black Messiah:
“For D’Angelo, an artist who captured the world’s attention with his stellar debut Brown Sugar in 1995 and then took five years to follow it up with the neo-soul defining Voodoo (2000), time between ventures wasn’t uncommon. But it took fourteen years for his third release to see the light of day, the ambitious and genius filled Black Messiah.
Fourteen years. That’s several lifetimes in today’s music scene. Time for audiences to move on. Time for rumors to build. Time for fear to set in. Time for self-doubt to rear its head and strike at the heart of the artist.
But in that extended hiatus, D’Angelo was still musically active, releasing cover versions of artists that had influenced him and guesting as a featured artist on many spots. But this just drove the desire to hear new original material.
And writing was taking place. Sessions with Questlove proved fruitful. Time locked away in a studio writing, composing, performing and producing in a similar vein to Prince delivered a bounty of tracks. But it wasn’t until D’Angelo was joined in the studio with a bevy of top-notch musicians that the stars aligned and work started to come into focus.
Tracks from the early 2010s were fine-tuned, revamped and reinvented and new material was written. And whilst D’Angelo is credited with vocals, guitar, piano, organ, keyboards, synthesizers, bass, electric sitar, drum programming, and percussion on the album, musicians such as Pino Palladino, Jesse Johnson, and vocalist and writing partner Kendra Foster all contributed in no small part. But still, this involved a 4-year process of working on one song for a month or two and then taking a month’s break. A slow and steady approach that built excitement as well as concern that it was busy work without any real deadline in sight (none that would be met anyway).
But then, spurred on by the racial inequality he was seeing amplified by the controversy surrounding both the Michael Brown Jr. and Eric Garner trials, D’Angelo pushed the release up by several months and on December 15, 2014 the world finally got to hear what D’Angelo had so painstakingly been brewing.
Steeped in funk, the album is strongly zeroed in on issues of race relations, the ongoing struggle for equality, and the value of human life, while still reserving time for a handful of tracks about good loving.
It’s been said that part of the reason for the extended hiatus was as a push back by D’Angelo against his public image of being a sex symbol that overshadowed his actual prowess as a musician and songwriter. As he sings in “Back To The Future (Part I)” with a tongue decidedly in his cheek, “So if you're wondering about the shape I'm in / I hope it ain't my abdomen that you're referring to / This what I want you to listen to,” not only is he casting off the sex symbol imagery conjured up by his previous outing, he’s also putting the focus on where it should have always been, and where it always belongs: on his art itself.
With Black Messiah, the focus is back where it belongs. It’s a beautiful, broody, murky mix of funk and soul that carries you from opening track to the final note. It’s not only an encapsulation of D’Angelo’s influence, but also a reminder of why it’s so important that his next release doesn’t take another fourteen years to surface. Though if it does, you can be sure it will be worth the wait”.
I want to turn to some reviews before wrapping things up. Pitchfork were stunned by the surprise release of an album that I think is the best thing D’Angelo has ever released. Alongside The Vanguard, they created this immaculate and enormously powerful work that should be required listening:
“With this week’s shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo, the man music critic Robert Christgau once earnestly dubbed "R&B Jesus," returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. It was not, as many have suggested, 14 years of silence. The last D'Angelo album, 2000’s Voodoo, was a near perfect communion of buttery soul, Crisco-fried funk, and hip-hop thump, but the video for its calling card ,"Untitled (How Does It Feel?)", a lingering, sensual glance over the singer’s face and chest, turned him into an unwitting sex symbol. Live shows soon descended into catcalling, and D, convinced his music had become an accessory to his looks, slipped slowly out of sight. Dispatches grew scarce and worrisome. There were arrests. There was a car accident. For a while, D'Angelo appeared to follow talented but troubled forbears Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone into the dark.
Even in darkness there was still music. D'Angelo guested on albums by J Dilla, Q-Tip, Snoop Dogg, and more. He taught himself to play guitar. There were perennial promises of a new album. D'Angelo returned to the stage in 2012 peppering sets of old favorites with carefully chosen covers and unreleased new material. Black Messiah isn’t a sneak attack; it’s a slow-simmering gumbo finally boiled over. We tasted its fearless ambivalence to genre boundaries in 2007 when Roots maestro Questlove snuck an early version of the stately Joe Pass homage of "Really Love" to Australia’s Triple J Radio, in 2010 when the punk-hop scorcher "1000 Deaths" briefly slipped onto YouTube and in 2012 when D'Angelo returned to television to unveil the big band funk smartbomb "Sugah Daddy" on the BET Awards. Still, it’s a wonder to hear his mutant groove unblemished by the passage of time and stretched around this gobstopping cosmic slop of country funk, psych and new wave.
Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos. The nightmarish chorus of "1000 Deaths" arrives late and fierce, as though the band unfurled its crunchy, lumbering vamp just long enough to violently snatch it out from under us. "The Charade"'s Minneapolis sound funk rock follows, every bit as bright as the previous track was menacing until you zero in on the threadbare heart-sickness of D and P-Funk affiliate Kendra Foster’s lyrics. Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite. One song might channel Funkadelic, another, the Revolution, but the shiftless mad doctor experimentation and the mannered messiness at the root of it all is unmistakably the Vanguard. Black Messiah is a dictionary of soul, but D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own. It’s at once familiar and oddly unprecedented, a peculiar trick to pull on an album recorded over the span of a decade.
The bipartite nostalgia romp "Back to the Future" looks for solace in memories ostensibly because the present is discouraging. The love songs run a little morbid. The titular pledge of "Betray My Heart" doesn’t speak fealty so much as candor, and the album’s barn burner of a closer "Another Life" is a song of devotion in the vein of the Stylistics’ "You Are Everything"—except that the couple never really meets. Black Messiah is about finding something to hang onto in dire times, soldiering through the infuriating insanity of oppression with a support system in tow. "It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen," D'Angelo writes in the liner notes. "Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader." He may have taken well over a decade to show face again, but it turns out D'Angelo is right on time”.
Even though you can strongly hear the influence of Prince and Sly Stone throughout Black Messiah, these heroes are used as starting points and references – without leaning too heavily towards them and D’Angelo losing his identity. Indeed, Black Messiah is a singular work that could only come from D’Angelo! This is what AllMusic offered when they tried to articulate what Black Messiah means to them:
“The one-eighty Questlove promised back in 2012, when the drummer and producer persuaded D'Angelo to perform for the first time in a dozen years, turns out to be closer to a ten. As those who caught later gigs and subsequent uploads could attest, there were no signs that D'Angelo -- enigmatic maker of two classics that twisted gospel, soul, funk, and hip-hop with aloof but deep-feeling swagger -- was developing his third studio album with production pointers from David Guetta or elocution lessons from Glee's vocal director. Instead, he's made another album that invites comparisons to the purposefully sloppy funk of Sly & the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On. It's more outward-looking, refined, and bristly than what preceded it, however, and has much in common with releases from retro-progressive peers like Van Hunt and Bilal. D'Angelo retains the rhythmic core that helped him create Voodoo, namely Questlove, bassist Pino Palladino, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and adds many players to the mix, including guitarist Jesse Johnson and drummers James Gadson and Chris Dave.
Q-Tip contributed to the writing of two songs, but a greater impact is made by Kendra Foster, who co-wrote the same pair, as well as six additional numbers, and can often be heard in the background. The societal ruminations within the fiery judder of "1000 Deaths," the dreamy churn of "The Charade," and the falsetto blues of "Till It's Done," fueled as much by current planetary ills and race relations as the same ones that prompted the works of D'Angelo's heroes, strike the deepest. Among the material that concerns spirituality, devotion, lost love, and lust, D'Angelo and company swing, float, and jab to nonstop grimace-inducing effect. On the surface, "Sugah Daddy" seems like an unassuming exercise in fusing black music innovations that span decades, and then, through close listening, the content of D'Angelo's impish gibberish becomes clear. At the other end, there's "Another Life," a wailing, tugging ballad for the ages that sounds like a lost Chicago-Philly hybrid, sitar and all, with a mix that emphasizes the drums. Black Messiah clashes with mainstream R&B trends as much as Voodoo did in 2000. Unsurprisingly, the artist's label picked this album's tamest, most traditional segment -- the acoustic ballad "Really Love" -- as the first song serviced to commercial radio. It's the one closest to "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," the Voodoo cut that, due to its revealing video, made D'Angelo feel as if his image was getting across more than his music. In the following song, the strutting "Back to the Future (Part I)," D'Angelo gets wistful about a lost love and directly references that chapter: "So if you're wondering about the shape I'm in/I hope it ain't my abdomen that you're referring to." The mere existence of his third album evinces that, creatively, he's doing all right. That the album reaffirms the weakest-link status of his singular debut is something else”.
An extraordinary album from a musical genius, it was a very pleasant early Christmas present that D’Angelo gave the world in 2014. After so long between albums, there could have been fears he had lost his touch or fans might have gone elsewhere. They came out in force (in the U.S. at least!); Black Messiah confirmed that he has still in a league of his own! From the opening bars of Ain’t That Easy to the final seconds of Another Life, Black Messiah is…
A faultless album.