Fans have been waiting 14 years for new music from D'Angelo and seemingly out of nowhere, he released his third album Black Messiah with help from his band The Vanguard. According to critics, despite the album's expedited release, the music sounds just as good and in ways, progressively better than Brown Sugar and Voodoo. Check out what they're saying after the jump.
SPIN gave Black Messiah a rating of 9 out of 10, praising its draws from Funk music.
Dark though it may be, the music itself invites repeated listens and rewards with serious loveliness. And it's worth noting that D and his crew - ?uesto, Q-Tip, Roy Hargrove, co-lyricist Kendra Foster, bassist Pino Palladino, drummer James Gadson, and engineer Russ Elevado, among others to be named — managed to make a record as virtuosic and sonically adventurous as Kanye West's Yeezus and Flying Lotus' You're Dead! using an analog approach. Black Messiah is both ancient and fresh — a surging mass of old blues and new soul built from classic thought and rebel spirit, unending angst and beautiful struggle, sunshine and moonlight and cynicism and sex and fighting and loving and losing and praying and cussing and hating and hoping and, oh what the hell:
ALL! HAIL! D'ANGELO! THE BL-
Rolling Stone said the wait for D'Angelo's highly-anticipated return was worth it, giving Black Messiah 4 1/2 stars out of 5.
Here's to messiahs worth waiting for. D'Angelo has kept the world fiending 14 years for the follow-up to his Crisco-thick R&B classic, Voodoo, but as the man himself purrs in "Sugah Daddy," "Can't snatch the meat out of the lioness' mouth/Sometimes you gotta just ease it out." Black Messiah shows how deep easy can go. D'Angelo and his band have built an avant-soul dream palace to get lost in, for 56 minutes of heaven.
HipHopDX followed suit giving the album the same rating noting its consistency and D'Angelo's artistic progression.
Together the album is well contained and doesn't jump around carelessly, but it moves to different places and resists a single thread or sound as D'Angelo does genres. Black Messiah is ambitious and adventurous, and in that way it delivers wholly on the promise of D'Angelo as an artist. In another way it's new and different for him, the sound is heavier and grittier in places, and more simple and sweeter in others. After so many years, that unwillingness to settle into the same groove is part and parcel to the D'Angelo we've all been waiting for. There's a comfort in not having to worry about more new music for now. There will be years spent with Black Messiah; it deserves the time to grow. And rise.
If you haven't already, check out Black Messiah on iTunes now and let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
