errant said:

Download it!!!

coltrane3 said:

I agree with this.

Devils Halo is her Amnesiac to The World Has Made..'s Kid A


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[Edited 10/9/09 11:44am]

^
I can see that.
And that's def not a bad thing.

I don't really think it sounds that much like TWHMMTMOMD... that album was very "produced" while the new album sounds much more "bare"... as if it was recorded much more quickly... a lot less political subject matter too...

duggalolly said:

I think so, too. I hear the musical progression, but her last few projects had really thick soundscapes, samples, song movements, digital trickery, etc. This seemed to me considerably more straightforward and uncomplicated. And, like Bitter, just about everything here is about romantic relationships, whereas TWHMMTMOMD was far more... hmm... "existential," if anything.

what?


what's it called? album art? I would google it but i dont even know the name

errant..Check f.y.e. music. I picked my copy up this morning from them. They had a few left in stock. Or you can check their site.

Can't wait to check this out. When MeShell puts out a new joint it's like X-mas.

I haven't gotten the new CD yet but did manage to catch the live show @ Highline Ballroom on 10/6/09. She put on an amazing show.

Some pefrormed song that night(not in order)
Outside Your Door
Lola
Crying in Your Beer
Fool of Me
Dead Nigga Blvd
Dirty Mind(Prince Cover)

Sorry I couldn't remember most of the newer titles.
A fantastic performance and she's was great with the audience.
Conversated with us and joked during little breaks.



She also closed with Let Me Love You Down!!! Sexy the way she plays it!
[Edited 10/10/09 19:10pm]

itunes labeleed Halo as 'unclassifiable." I had to rename the category

SPYZFAN1 said:

Merry X-mas Bruh...
It's really good. If you like last the 4, it's right up there. Kinda a companion piece to TWHMMTMOMD.
Like xlr8r said,
It's her Amnesiac.

Cinnie said:

duh?

such a difficult time tracking this down. ended up getting it at a Best Buy over an hour away and had to drive back there and exchange it for another copy because i was playing it on the way home and it had a scratch on it.


anyway.


this is brilliant. it's definitely a companion piece to The World Has Made Me.... i adore it. she has again proven herself to be the greatest soul/funk/r&b(/even rock?) artist of her generation. stunning as always. easily a contender for album of the year. i'm in awe of her.

Cinnie said:

Devil's Halo

errant said:

Thank ya

Listening to "Devil's Halo" on IMEEM right fuckin' now.

great album! 2 thumbs up.

I am a bit surprised that the best song on the cd is a cover song.

errant said:

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

don't even start

BlaqueKnight said:

SHE DID! I thought I was the only one who noticed!

errant said:

I guess the template is broken

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

huh?

errant said:

that's what started the bitchfight in the other thread Let me just shut my mouth while we are both head, I mean ahead

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

da fuck?

errant said:

Lammastide said:

This is my initial issue with the album. I expected something more adventurous so I'm having to get acclimated. Nothing conceptually stood out but based on your review there is a lot to think about. I haven't delved into the lyrics yet as I've only listened the one time. I'll continue to explore and I'm sure I'll find the genius in it in time.

These (and many more) reviews of the new record over at http://freemyheart.com/ev...#839106181


"'Hearing' Meshell Ndgeocello Again
by Mark Anthony Neal on October 18, 2009

Part of the initial appeal of Meshell Ndegeocello, one off the first artists signed to Madonna’s Maverick label, was her effortless exoticism. Arriving on the scene in 1993 with Plantation Lullabies and seemingly from a nether post somewhere between Trey Ellis’s “new black aesthetic” and Biggie’s “Big Poppa,” it wasn’t difficult for Ndegeocello, like Dionne Farris or PM Dawn’s Prince Be, to be easily cited as that other-type Negro—whatever that happened to be on any given day. But baby-gurl could pluck it with the best of them—Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Nathan East, Larry Graham, and of course Bootsy—so the regular, round-the-way Negros took notice. Wasn’t a black radio station in the country that wasn’t featuring “Outside Your Door” on their Quiet Storm program in those days. For the white folk not likely to venture down the radio dial, there was that duet with John Cougar Mellencamp, flipping the old Van Morrison classic “Wild Night” into an MTV staple. It was the only whiff a pop chart that Ndegeocello would ever get.

When Ndegeocello returned in 1996 with Peace Beyond Passion, courting controversy with a decidedly innocuous indictment of homophobia—by contemporary standards at least—on “Leviticus: Faggot,” her sound was lean, fierce and muscular, driving originals like “The Way” and her gender-bending cover of Bill Withers’ “Who is He and What is He to You?.” Folk might not have known what to do with the message and even less with the messenger, but it was clear that if you gave the woman more than a few moments, you too would be moving your ass.

With a winning formula in the mix—an old adage really, “free your mind and your ass will follow”—Ndegeocello played against expectation, making the first of several artistic statements. Bitter, her 1999 follow-up to Peace Beyond Passion, wasn’t so much a recording as it was musical brooding session and with it she had my ears and my heart. I have not listened to anything quite the same since, finding disparate passions in the music of Terry Callier, Laura Nyro, Alana Davis, Chocolate Genius, Lizz Wright, Bill Withers (quiet as it’s kept) and a host of others whose most common resonances were in registers far beneath the surface. What has been clear over the last decade is that Ndgeocello herself, has been most comfortable when she trust her ears instead of her body, so that even when she made that last stab at other-chartly and political relevance with Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, it was the darker hues of “Jabril” and “Earth” that told on her—and on us for that matter.

Seems as if 2003’s Comfort Woman—an overlooked gem in any era, like Robert Marley’s Kaya—marks the beginning of Ndegeocello’s loss of faith in her ears, though as the primary composer and conductor of Dance of the Infidel (2005) she conjured, with Lalah Hathaway, beauty unrequited on the slow as death cover of “When Did You Leave Heaven.” With Devil’s Halo, her new recording on the Downtown/Mercer Street label, Ndegeocello’s faith in her ears and our ability to 'hear' her is renewed.

While there are still hints of the Emo rock that marked 2007’s The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, Devil’s Halo settles on a mood somewhere in between The World… and Bitter. The bassist remains lyrically provocative throughout—Ernest Hardy notes this ditty from “Lola:” “a wife’s just a whore with a diamond ring”—but here is wordless quality about Ndegeocello’s vocal performance. Tracks like “Tie One On” and the twangy (in the tradition of Craig Street’s work with Lizz Wright and Cassandra Wilson) “Crying in My Beer,” are simply beautiful in their starkness; the lyrics largely served as adornments. Tellingly, the title track is an instrumental that Ndegeocello wrote when she was a teen growing up in Washington, DC.

Though Ndegeocello has long distanced herself from mainstream contemporary R&B, her most striking artistic statement on Devil Halo comes from the R&B world of the 1980s. Ready for the World’s classic slow drag, “Love You Down” was ripe for a post-auto-tune update, but Ndegeocello gives the song a breathtaking new edge—dreamy and urgent. Ndegeocello tells music journalist John Murph, “Love You Down” is a song that “brings up fond memories. It has a great melody. Also I had a great time trying to put the song through my [artistic] filter. I hope people hear the love in my version.”




"Verse-Chorus-Verse: An Interview with Meshell Ndegeocello by PC Muñoz

The stellar 2003 Dolly Parton tribute album, Just Because I’m a Woman, features a fine batch of rock and country flavored arrangements of Dolly Parton songs performed by Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, and Melissa Etheridge, amongst others. It’s a great, highly listenable set, but as flavorful as it is, nothing in it quite prepares the listener for Meshell Ndegeocello’s penultimate track—an elastic-funk re-imagination of Parton’s party-ready hit “Two Doors Down”. Beat-centric, atmospheric, and half-rapped, Ndegeocello’s re-working of the Parton classic is not only sly and musically imaginative, it’s also an apt embodiment of Ndegeocello’s overall approach: bold, adventurous, defiantly singular, and funky as hell.

I’m convinced that if Meshell Ndegeocello’s work and persona weren’t so thoroughly infused with a hip-hop spirit, it would be much easier for music-heads to locate her as part of the same continuum as Bob Dylan, Prince, Neil Young, and other quirky pop maverick-geniuses known for bravely and consistently paving their own path in the industry. As an (often) bald, (always) black bi-sexual female bassist who raps as much as she sings, writes deeply and confrontationally about race and sex (amongst other things), and mashes-up genres with every project, Ndegeocello’s mere presence on the scene (let alone the gestalt of her work) presents a taxonomical problem to solve for a large segment of music lovers, and an even trickier problem for those specifically on the lookout for singer-songwriters who may be the rightful heirs to the rock royalty named above. Part of the difficulty for some of these folks, of course, is the fact that killer grooves and textured rhythm parts (which are treasured elements in funk and hip-hop, while sometimes mere arrangement considerations in other genres), no matter how intricately conceived and executed, are still often not considered components of “great songwriting”, although they are, perhaps hypocritically, definitely understood as potential building blocks of “great records”. Hence, someone like Jeff Tweedy, who I like and respect quite a bit, is generally considered to be one of the handful of Gen X songwriters who deserves a place in the pantheon of great, adventurous artists, while Ndegeocello, who has traversed much more diverse ground, including a fairly straightforward guitar-based singer-songwriter album (1999’s gorgeous Bitter), is often in danger of being considered a high-profile cult artist.

I recommend the aforementioned Bitter as a starting point for folks who want to get familiar with Ndegeocello’s music. Soulful, affecting, and beautifully produced by the abundantly gifted Craig Street, it’s a warm introduction to Ndegocello’s music, and a wonderful way to first encounter her enticing and intimate vocal style. It also includes one of her patented unique covers, Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love”. From there, you can have lots of fun jumping around to prior or subsequent releases, each one an adventure.

What was the first song you fell in love with, and what is your current relationship to the piece?
“Soft and Wet” by Prince. It just sounded angelic, the way his vocals were layered, and it made me want to dance. It’s still the song and the album that made me say, “That’s what I’m gonna do.”

Who is your favorite “unsung” artist or songwriter, someone who you feel never gets their due? Talk a little bit about him/her.
Doyle Bramhall II. When he sings a song, his heart is just on the stage. He transports me. He’s an incredible songwriter and a ridiculous guitarist. He’s also just a nice person.

Is there an artist, genre, author, filmmaker, etc. who/which has had a significant impact/influence on you, but that influence can’t be directly heard in your music?
Probably most. Film for sure. I love Fassbinder. I have a lyric on the new record that goes “fear eats the soul”, which is from a title of one of his films.

Do you view songwriting as a calling, a gig, a hobby, other…?
Other. It’s a transmission.

Name one contemporary song that encourages you about the future of songwriting/pop music.
“Love Dog” by TV on the Radio. They give me hope.

On Meshell Ndegocello’s newest release, Devil’s Halo, she continues her tradition of curve-ball covers, this time with an undulating, super-sexy version of “Love You Down”, the ‘80s R&B hit originally performed by Ready for the World. Because the songs she covers can sometimes be nearly unrecognizable in her renderings, it’s tempting to call her arrangements “complete deconstructions”, but I think a more accurate term would be “creative distillations”: she gets to the heart of each piece and retains what’s needed (whether it’s a musical component or not), and proceeds from there to build a new version. In her hands, “Love You Down” is completely transformed.

Ndegeocello was definitely my adopted spiritual patron saint when I was working on my version of Pixies’ “I Bleed” (which featured Oakland’s mighty funk-soul queen, FEMI) for American Laundromat Records’ Pixies tribute album, Dig for Fire. That record featured tracks by the Rosebuds, They Might Be Giants, and other indie-rock stalwarts. Knowing that I would be the only non-indie-rocker on the project, and hearing stories about the ferocity of Pixies fans regarding covers of the group’s material, was a little daunting at first, but I took inspiration in the implicit attitude of Ndegeocello’s Parton cover—- the message I took from it was to wear my stylistic difference loud and proud.

In addition to the “Love You Down” cover, there’s also a bunch of cool new original material on Devil’s Halo. Visit meshell.com for information on the new album, discography, tour dates and more.

—PC Muñoz"

more reviews and insights...

http://freemyheart.com/ev...#677109281

http://ernesthardy.blogsp...-real.html


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[Edited 10/23/09 21:13pm]