blackSUMMERS'night

While the album is not as fluid as BLACKsummers'night and has a couple frayed ends, it includes a high quantity of open-hearted ballads and variable-tempo jams that sparkle with indisputable power.

Very few albums are worth such a long wait ... but blackSUMMERS’night is one of them – it’s an album that should live forever, purely because it sounds so detached from time.

Instead of relying on the traditional musical flourishes of its predecessor, SUMMERS’ finds Maxwell crafting music from an impressively explorative space, making it his most musically expansive and invigorating album since 1998’s Embrya.

With forever-sophisticated lyrics sung in his still-creamy voice over a band so tight they sound loose, blackSUMMERS’night is probably Maxwell’s most cohesive effort since his sublime (critics panned it; they were wrong) sophomore album, Embrya—and the first since then with no skippable tracks.

Evolving from an inchoate and rhythmically lethargic R&B simulacrum to structures that, like a good poet’s command of the sonnet, gave him liberties within the affirmations of form, Maxwell has nevertheless sculpted an aqueous and often androgynous sound.

Maxwell is R&B, evolved; one hopes that other artists are taking notes.

Think of Maxwell as R&B's Thom Yorke – a cosmic love man riding open-ended grooves that shift from inner exploration to booty motivation in the blink of an eye.

Mostly ... the music provides a minimalist, synthesiser-laden vehicle for smoothly introspective contemplations on love.

An album built around sophisticated, laidback neo-soul grooves, the sound is uniformly immaculately recorded and well-layered - highlights like III and Gods are a total pleasure to listen to in headphones.

blackSUMMERS’night may not be a fully satisfying meal, but there are enough tasty morsels to leave us craving for the final one-third of the trilogy.

‘blackSUMMERS’night’ retains Maxwell’s sense of wonder and allure while opening him up to a new wave of electronic ambience, a natural haven for the singer when you remember his unjustly panned record ‘Embrya’.

Despite its many flaws, blackSUMMERS’night is one of the year’s most fascinating R&B albums and proof that the genre’s old guard is just as capable of creating innovative, mind-bending music as the Frank Oceans and Beyoncés that populate its vanguard today. I can’t wait for blacksummer’sNIGHT.

But where his debut was part Marvin Gaye, part Prince, blackSummers’ Night is light on funk, making its creator, in the era of Frank Ocean, look like the yesterday’s man of R&B.