D’Angelo – “Really Love” (SONG REVIEW)

[rating=9.00]

Swooning strings introduce D’Angelo’s new single, “Really Love.” They never let up, and neither does anything else. Not Pino Palladino’s loping, melodic bassline, which seems to respond to the singer’s nonstop vocal coaxings and maneuvers. Not the flamenco-inflected guitar, which moves as naturally and idiosyncratically as Big D’s speak-singing. Not the whispered conversation in Spanish, which starts the song, and which dips in and out throughout it. For all its musical intricacy and subtly shifting rhythms, this is the most lyrically simple song on Black Messiah, D’s long-awaited comeback LP. D’Angelo’s seducing that girl, and he’s seducing us, too.

“Really Love” makes sense as the album’s first single since it sounds closest to the juicy sex grooves of Voodoo, a fluidity that Black Messiah otherwise mostly eschews for a more jagged, rough-hewn sound that refuses to let us settle into the beat. Compare “Really Love” to the equally, um, incomparable single, “Sugah Daddy.” That track has bursts and spurts, bits of shrillness in the horns and vocals alike. In “Sugah Daddy,” D exhorts. That filthy-minded song’s all about sex, good sex – good God, is it good. “Really Love” is about its title, though, so the man croons here – licking instead of biting, caressing instead of burning down the bed.

We need both modes in this song — on the album, “Really Love” comes right after “Sugah Daddy,” and they make a pair. It’s D’Angelo’s particular genius that he invests both modes with fullness and experimental oddities that nevertheless cohere into great, catchy pop. Ain’t no way that “Really Love” is any less sexy than “Sugah Daddy.” But with “Really Love,” he gives over the complexities of love (and the love of black music) to the musical arrangements. Imagine his lyrics and voice collectively as the song’s bed. It’s his voice – not really what it’s saying – that we need, that we’ve been missing for 14 years. The music, though, is all that acrobatic rustling — goose-pimply and liquid and weird and joyful — that happens in and on top of that bed. Turns out we’ve been missing that, too.