Sade - Soldier of Love
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CD Details
Artist: SadeBrand: Sony
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2010-02-09
Model: 886976393328
Music Label: Sony
Product features:
- Sultry, Dynamic, Jazzy, Steamy
- elegantly soulful
- The Moon and The Sky
- Solider of Love
- Morning Bird
- Babyfather
- Long Hard Road
- Be That Easy
- Bring Me Home
- In Another Time
- Skin
- The Safest Place
Music reviews of Soldier of Love
Music Review: Lazy Effort
Rating: 2 Stars
In the beginning, Sade was a group that put great effort and Pride (pun intended) into instrumentation, creating a rich and lush sound that combined the best of smooth jazz, R&B, soul and even older genres of jazz. I looked forward just as much to Stuart Matthewman's sax and guitar solos as I did Sade Adu's voice. But I also noticed a trend during the course of their albums - each album was slightly more minimalist than the last.
Diamond Life and Promise were musical Tour de Forces that layered rhythms, harmonies, solos and excitement. They were actually too complex to just put on at night and meditate to. Then came Stronger than Pride, and we saw the beginning of the trend to streamline the music section. It was still a strong album, but it was definitely beneath Diamond Life and Promise. And the grooves, even though they lacked the sophistication of arrangement that the previous two albums had, were upbeat and addictive. To someone who followed the path of Sade in real time, it was easy to just look at it as their inevitable movement more towards R&B and less towards Jazz.
If Stronger than Pride flirted with R&B, Love Deluxe was a full out affair. Love Deluxe continued Sade's path away from emphasizing instrumentation and for the first time introduced the very thing that would later become their undoing (in my eyes) - the "two chord". The "two chord" is a song that consists of, as the name implies, just two chords, or multiple chords that follow just two modes. The song goes up a chord for a few bars, then comes back down. Then up again, then down again. Sade introduced the two chord to their discography with Bulletproof Soul.
So was Love Deluxe a bad album? No, actually. In fact, it's a great album. It's the Sade album I probably listen to the most. In fact, I love Bulletproof Soul in all of its trip-hop prototype glory! And that's why I didn't identify the warning signs beforehand. Love Deluxe's strength was in its simplicity. It was sexy, it grooved and it "swinged". And when a beat is sexy, groovy and swings, then it can be forgiven for being an endless loop of one or two chords.
And that brings me to Lovers Rock - when it all started falling apart.
I don't know exactly what happened. Did Sade get together and say, "Man, I can't believe how easy it was to make Love Deluxe. We've got to do this again"? I don't know. But they removed the elements of instrumentation completely from Lovers Rock. No more solos, no more instrumentals, very little jazz. Completely digital rhythm section, completely engineered, and filled with two chord songs. The difference from Love Deluxe, however, is that it also lacked the groove and the swing that makes such affronts forgivable. For all the simplicity of Bulletproof Soul, it enveloped and hypnotized you. It bewitched and entranced you, like a Deep House song. Lovers Rock had no such effect. Rather than hypnotizing you, it served more to put you to sleep. You didn't focus on the songs the way you did in her earlier albums (especially her first two) - now the songs blend into the background of whatever you're doing at the time you're listening to the music. Only occasionally do you remember that an album is playing.
Unfortunately, Soldier of Love continues that trajectory with an even slower album, and therefore takes them further and further away from what made them great. The initial track, The Moon and the Sky, is the strongest of the entire album, although like every other song on the album, suffers from the two chord syndrome in parts. But it swinged, and that made it OK.
I knew there were dark storms on the horizon when I heard the title track on the radio the past couple of months. I suppose it's entirely a matter of personal taste, but I've never been a fan of "theme" songs, where the instruments and vocals and lyrics all converge to create a thematic effect, like rush hour traffic, or life in space, or in this case, war. It's all too "video game soundtrack" for me, as though I've reached the stage where I have to defeat the Ottomans and liberate the Armenians before something bad that nobody will acknowledge today happens to them.
Soldier of Love is the exception to the formula followed by every other song on this album, which veers between pale imitations of Pearls and the increasingly common two chorders. Sure, there was the "caribbean" variety of the two chorder, and the "R&B" variety of the two chorder, but few of them grooved (exceptions being Bring Me Home and the aforementioned Moon and the Sky), and they all blended into the background.
This album is more befitting Deep Forest than vintage Sade.
Listen, I understand a tendency sometimes to idealize one's favorite artist, and in the process demonize people critical of that artist as somehow "not getting it" or "not being sophisticated enough" to understand the nuances or being dismissed as a non-fan better suited listening to Katy Perry. I wrote this rather lengthy review to establish my bona fides as a Sade fan and show that I do love the group, I do understand the group, and I do know good music when I hear it. But part of being a Sade fan is being objective and honest in determining how an album stacks up to previous efforts. If you're a true Sade fan, you have an obligation to listen to it objectively, and not to play it while subconsciously playing Promise in your head. Do you remember the first time you heard Smooth Operator and how you would hum it to yourself in the shower for weeks/months/years afterwards? Have you hummed any of the songs from this album yet? That's all you need to know.
Ultimately, I'm not sure how an objective Sade fan could listen to this and think it ranks as a peer to Diamond Life, Promise or even Love Deluxe. And I say that with a heavy heart as a lifelong Sade fan.
Description of Soldier of Love
Known for their one of a kind timeless sound, Sade has enjoyed phenomenal success both internationally and stateside throughout the span of their twenty-five year career. The highly anticipated new body of work SOLDIER OF LOVE features 10 new songs including the latest single, "Soldier Of Love".Pop CDs
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