Caught in the Carousel

Maxwell

BLACKsummers'night
Columbia

Maxwell

Perhaps musicians should stick to schedules: an album every two years, maybe a tour every four (though with the new economic realities of iTunes era music, you might need a tour every two years as well). Because it seems that to deviate from that schedule invites more trouble than necessary. You can flood the market, a la Bob Dylan, and release every single recording and come across as a megalomaniac who thinks himself incapable of anything other than genius. Or, you can come around every eight years and assume the world will slam its brakes on in order to let you right back on. Though rarely does either situation reward the artist or the listener, eight years of silence is always the bigger risk.

Maxwell has been missing from the musical landscape for nearly a decade now (give or take a single here or there). And if that weren't enough, he returns with a scant 38 minutes of music that is Part One of a purported trilogy. But Maxwell has never shown a desire to play it safe (he followed his surprisingly successful debut with an unplugged album that featured a both haunting and straightforward cover of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work"). And so it is utterly baffling that after such a long absence, after much-rumored struggles with his record company, his hair, his inner demons, he has returned with such a, well, lazy album. On many of the album's tracks the listener is geared up for that wonderful falsetto to kick the song into another gear, and yet Maxwell doesn't go there. The effort is not made. And on one track—one-ninth of the album—he doesn't even sing a note!

The album's first single, "Pretty Wings," is nice where it is supposed to be nice, smooth where roughness wouldn't be appropriate, comfortable the way any mattress is when you are dead tired. But it is also formulaic, lyrically inspired by the video that would have to be made as an accompaniment.

Interestingly, it's the next track, the anti-Maxwell song, "Help Somebody," that one hopes is a signal of the future for the artist. An "anti-Maxwell song" because it's not filled with bedroom whispers and nuanced insinuations. There is a wider reach, one beyond the bedroom, the home, the high-end Tribeca lofts. It takes the title literally; it is a song that might best reflect Maxwell's long absence. Eight years of living under the constraints of the Bush Doctrine has, if nothing else, taught us all to reach out and help our fellow citizens. (A call to action that was ironically put into action by the Bush Administration when it hadn't enough manpower to do anything other than flyovers of New Orleans because all our resources were fighting a bogus war). The music on this strikingly refreshing track is also bigger, more daring, rhythmically part Deliverance part New Jack City. It is the most exciting moment on a record desperately in need of some non-horizontal action.

Elsewhere there is Maxwell doing a lovely version of Maxwell, circa 1997 ("Love You") and then there are Maxwell's fiscally-vested personages phoning in forgettable ballads that could only be deemed luxurious by a public so starved for decent R&B music it elevates Lil' Wayne to the status of a Mozart. And so, the album will sell just fine, thanks. And that's not a bad thing because it should guarantee a quick-on-the-heels follow up of Volume II. And every Maxwell endeavor holds a silken promise of the kind of R&B magic we rarely see anymore, its ingredients long harbored away by Maxwell, Sade, D'Angelo, those singers we know by one name because one doesn't call out a lover's first and last name (except when role-playing, and that's a whole different article for an entirely different website).

—Thomas Cooney