d' Angelo

Canadian-Italian singer Emily D’Angelo announces her upcoming second solo DG album freezing, which features seventeen songs drawn from folk tradition, art song and beyond. The mezzo-soprano offers a personal take on music that spans five centuries, ranging from songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell; Rebecca Clarke, Zoltán Kodály, W.C. Handy and Philip Glass; to recent works by Randy Newman, Jeanine Tesori, Cecilia Livingston, “Adrian Ira” Kramer and US band Ween.

"Enargeia" is an ancient Greek word meaning extreme vividness, the evocation of a visual scene. It's a bit hard to see how this applies in more than a general way to the program on mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo. She writes: "Each piece is part of a sonic journey, each track born out of the previous one as the listener is guided through a progression, a cohesive and exploratory listening experience." This being so, one wonders why the track ordering is different in the physical and at least some online presentations of the album, but these are minor complaints.

R&B figurehead D'Angelo has his seminal debut album of 1995, Brown Sugar, newly reissued in remastered and expanded 2CD and digital deluxe editions by Virgin/UMe.
The new deluxe edition features the original ten-track album followed by no fewer than 21 rare tracks. These include remixes by CJ Mackintosh, Dallas Austin, King Tech, Erick Sermon and Incognito. The 2CD set will be in a digipak with a 20-page booklet featuring an essay by author-filmmaker Nelson George, rare photographs, and lyrics for the ten original tracks.

By the mid-'90s, most urban R&B had become rather predictable, working on similar combinations of soul and hip-hop, or relying on vocal theatrics on slow, seductive numbers. With his debut album, Brown Sugar, the 21-year-old D'Angelo crashed down some of those barriers. D'Angelo concentrates on classic versions of soul and R&B, but unlike most of his contemporaries, he doesn't cut and paste older songs with hip-hop beats; instead, he attacks the forms with a hip-hop attitude, breathing new life into traditional forms. Not all of his music works – there are several songs that sound incomplete, relying more on sound than structure. But when he does have a good song – like the hit "Brown Sugar," Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'," or the bluesy "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," among several others – D'Angelo's wild talents are evident. Brown Sugar might not be consistently brilliant, but it is one of the most exciting debuts of 1995, giving a good sense of how deep D'Angelo's talents run.