We've been waiting a long, long time to get another album out of RVA R&B superstar D'Angelo, who dropped his all-time classic Voodoo back in 2000, killed the world with his abs in the video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)," then got cold feet about trying to follow up his masterpiece and dropped out of sight for most of a decade. Thankfully, we've been seeing more of him over the last couple of years, and word has it that his third album, James River, is all but finished and will drop sometime this year (this spring, maybe? But let's not get too excited).
Here's the latest development--on Monday night, at Brooklyn Bowl in New York City, D'Angelo and his longtime collaborator, Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, played a surprise set. Billed under the name "The Soulquarians: Brothers In Arms," the two of them were the only musicians onstage, with D'Angelo switching between various keyboards and electric pianos while ?uestlove held it down on the drum kit. Spicing up their set with covers of Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic, Prince, Sly & The Family Stone, and more, the duo also played a generous mix of originals from D'Angelo's first two albums--"The Root,""The Line," and "Africa" among them--before ending with an encore of 1996 top 10 single "Lady."
There was some onstage referencing of the long-awaited third LP; "y'all waited 13 years, you can wait another two hours," ?uestlove joked after a delay in the start of the set. Of course, the big news is that, towards the end of the evening, ?uestlove asked D'Angelo if the new album was almost finished, to which D'Angelo's response was simply, "Yes." A promising sign, no doubt, but after 13 years, it's hard to get one's hopes up again for something that we all thought would be here a long time ago. Then again, Guns N' Roses did eventually release Chinese Democracy, and this year has already seen the release of My Bloody Valentine's 22-years-in-the-making followup to 1991's Loveless, a record that pretty much every MBV fan had given up on at least a decade ago. In this age of wonders, anything is possible, so let's all keep our fingers crossed.
In the meantime, here's what you really want to see: video from Monday night's show. Okayplayer shot this excellent-sounding multi-camera clip of D'Angelo and ?uestlove covering the SOS Band's 1983 single "Tell Me If You Still Care:"
Here's another Okayplayer clip, of "Africa," from Voodoo:
Here's a video of the duo performing "All Right," from D'Angelo's debut album, Brown Sugar, shot by audience member Atane Ofiaja:
And here's the first half of the encore version of "Lady" (there are clips of the full song on youtube, but they unfortunately aren't in this quality):
By Andrew Necci; photo courtesy Okayplayer