'BLACKsummers’night' offers that rarest of balances: It’s both embraceable and unbound. The pieces still venture out there, but never to a point that fudges or bores. His melodies became increasingly diffuse his attention to the mood overtook his focus on songs.Īll that’s been corrected this time. The latter pursuit got Maxwell into some trouble in his followup work. Not only did he share Marvin’s diaphanous falsetto, both stars abstracted standard R&B melodies into something more ambient and free. That’s ironic, because Maxwell’s debut, 1996’s 'Urban Hang Suite,' found him compared ad nauseam to that earlier icon, and understandably so. The stop-the-presses result ranks as one of the most sophisticated rethinks of soul music since Marvin Gaye blew up the form in the early ’70s. While the Brooklyn-based singer has always put an original stamp on soul, never has he devised work of this invention or erudition. But it’s clear from his new CD, 'BLACKsummers’night,' he also used the time to woodshed something esthetically unique. Maxwell has said he used his sabbatical to clear his head and get a life. Two of the other leading lights of modern alterna-soul also went poof, including Lauryn Hill, who became too spooked by fame to risk recording another CD, and D’Angelo, who hasn’t been seen since we saw nearly all of him in his smash nudie video for 'How Does It Feel.' Maxwell spent the last eight years in a creative coma, like R&B’s answer to Rumpelstiltskin.
