The beat pulses along in an uneasy mutant-disco rhythm. Track one, “All The Ways Love Can Feel,” brings all these elements together into one of the year’s most formidable album openers. Live instruments abound, as is par for the course in neo-soul, but he’s not afraid to use MIDI presets or trippy effects (there are more phasers here than I’ve heard on any R&B record). Maxwell’s voice is part of the texture as often as it’s front and center. Far from the tuxedoed conservatism of its predecessor, this album at times resembles the soaring art-rock of Radiohead or Wild Beasts more than anything one might traditionally associate with R&B. This is the some of most joyfully experimental music he’s ever made and his best album since Urban Hang Suite.
If this was what he’d settled into, the saga of Maxwell had come to a disappointing anticlimax.īlackSUMMERS’night, the second installment of a trilogy that will eventually conclude with blacksummers’NIGHT, proves he’s still restless. Accordingly, BLACKsummers’night was clunky, too awkward to be as elegant as he wanted it to be, a textbook case of reach exceeding grasp. Of those, only one – his great debut Urban Hang Suite – was really worth a listen. The singer had released only three albums before then, all in a five-year span between 19. However, it was a role he hadn’t quite earned.
When Maxwell released BLACKsummers’night back in 2009, he seemed to be settling into the role of neo-soul elder statesman.
