| Latimesblogs.latimes |
 The best way to listen to Maxwell's new "BLACKsummers' Night" is with the volume turned all the way up. The R&B artist didn't take a turn toward heavy metal during the eight years he's spent between releasing albums; this one, like his previous three, is full of meditative jams written on the continuum between ardor and heartache. But as genteel and deceptively traditionalist as is Maxwell's veneer, he's always been bent on taking urban music forward: he just takes obsessively careful, small steps, best appreciated through close attention.
And he believes, passionately, in dynamics. Many of the songs on "BLACKsummers' Night," the first part of a trilogy Maxwell plans to unfold over the next few years, are structured around a short musical phrase, played on a keyboard or guitar, on which everything else loops and builds. (Doesn't that sound like Radiohead's approach? That's an inspiration Maxwell has cited in interviews.)...full text |
|
| Allmusic |
| Maxwell spent part of the eight years between his third and fourth studio albums walking the Earth, attempting to experience a life resembling that of a human. One of neo-soul's most visible faces, along with Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo, he had been on the music industry's hamster wheel for most of his twenties and needed some tangible inspiration. At some point he got down to scheming and quite a lot of recording; BLACKsummers'night is the first release of a trilogy, with BlackSUMMERS'night (rooted in gospel, with a twist, apparently) and Blacksummers'NIGHT (promised as a disc of slow jams) to follow. Just as he arrived in 1996, offering an alternate option to the exaggerated masculinity that was dominating contemporary R&B, he returns as the airwaves are stuffed with raging hormones expressed through Auto-Tune. He has made no concessions to them. BLACKsummers'night is all devotion, regret, and heartache, written with Now collaborator Hod David and played by a session band, including a horn section, that sounds closer to a touring band that has been supporting the singer for years. The musicians morph with every shift in emotion through arrangements that are unfailingly exquisite and sensitively nuanced, even when they are briskly played. If the singer got into adventures while he was away, he does not detail them during these 38 unified minutes, but he did go through a serious, failed relationship, just as "Pretty Wings," the album's floating pre-album single, suggested. Like the real-life flip side to Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" -- the song Maxwell performed at the 2008 BET Awards, signaling his return -- it's catharsis through bittersweet elegance, equal in its enamored resentment ("You toyed with my affliction/Had to fill out my prescription") and remorse ("I came wrong, you were right/Transformed your love into like"). Although the rest of the album leaves plenty of space for the most common form of pleading, the disarming "Fistful of Tears" is as impassioned as the steamiest moments and indicates the complexity of Maxwell's relationship: "'Cause I go insane, crazy sometimes/Trying to keep you from losing your mind/Open your eyes, see what's in front of your face/Save me my fistful of...tears." For all its dimensions and progress, the album is simultaneously designed to ensure that devoted fans will feel the wait was worth it. After all, its opening lines are "Make me crazy, don't speak no sound/I want you to prove it to me in the nude," and they are sung in falsetto....full text |
|
| Ew |
In the cult 1986 Disney sci-fi flick Flight of the Navigator, a young boy is beamed up to an alien spaceship and returned in what feels like minutes, only to find that eight Earth years have passed in his absence. Neo-soul singer Maxwell's disappearance undoubtedly has a more terrestrial cause, but he too seemed to fall off the edge of the planet for eight long years, following the release of his last album, 2001's Now — and is reemerging in 2009 to a very different musical landscape from the one he left.
Judging by BLACKsummers'night's buttery, intimate bedroom grooves, the Brooklyn-born crooner has changed surprisingly little in the near-decade interim, beyond shearing off his trademark cloud of coffee-colored hair. Still, when he coos wistfully to a recalcitrant lover, ''You come out from nowhere, disappear and reappear/Houdini would be very proud,'' on the sinuous, piano-riddled ''Love You,'' he could just as easily be referencing his own escape act. Tracks like the mournful, falsetto- laced first single ''Pretty Wings'' and lite-funky ''Cold'' perfectly suit his cognac vocals, though at times BLACK is almost too smooth. Maxwell has the vocal chops to stand (or lie, as it were) among the best pillow-talk maestros, from Marvin Gaye to Terence Trent D'Arby; salacious couplets like ''I want you to prove it to me in the nude/Addicted to the way you move,'' on his love-is-the-drug rave-up ''Bad Habits,'' are custom-built for baby-making. But his sentiments rarely transcend the boudoir — and listeners lulled by the album's unvaryingly sleek, high-gloss beats may just drift off to dreamland before they get there. B...full text |
|
Send "Maxwell " Ringtones to your Cell 
