After a 10-year hiatus following the release of Lover’s Rock in 2000, Sade returns to the music scene with Soldier of Love, a collection of daring ballads that gives listeners and fans a little of the Sade we love and a little of the Sade we haven’t heard before.
BEaring the pet name of its lead singer, Helen Folasade Adu, the group includes the vocals of Sade Adu and the instrumentals of three other musicians—Andrew Hale on keyboards, Paul S. Denman on bass, and Stuart Matthewman on guitar and saxophone—who have been with the band since its inception in the early 1980s, when Sade performed as a splinter group from a fledgling Latin soul project in Britain called Pride.
Like much of the group’s previous music together, Soldier of Love plays out beautifully–but the album departs from the usual trappings of the group’s well-celebrated cache.
It is not difficult to define classic Sade. The group laid out its stylings early on with its industry debut of Smooth Operator, establishing itself as a sophisticated mix of R&B and jazz. Classic Sade is smooth, cool, and sophisticated.
Classic Sade is also a narrative. From Diamond Life onward, the group has composed a series of narratives about the lives of the lonely, the poor, and the unfaithful.
Soldier of Love continues these traditions. “Be That Easy” and “In Another Time” are two bluesy pieces that feature the signature saxophone rifts and follow the narrative motifs of Sade’s earlier albums.
But while Sade has been cool, it has not been hip, and while much of its music has always merged contemporary pop movements with jazz, the music has often been beautifully esoteric. That is until Sade’s first major shift with the release of Lover’s Rock in 2000, which pulled heavily from modern hip-hop influences—heavy baselines and percussion—and was more of the mainstream, more like the music of other R&B and pop artists which were incorporating rap and hip-hop motifs into the remixes of their songs.
Soldier of Love continues the shift, opening with “The Moon and the Sky,” a mix of Adu’s classic smooth voice over a hip-hop bass line, drums, and guitars, “Soldier of Love,” a sharp and percussion heavy single that premiered on national radio stations in December of last year, and “Baby’s Father” which pays homage to a contemporary theme in hip-hop.
As an album, the music just makes sense. Sade is in its third decade and reflects the shifts in the larger pop world, and for neophytes and older converts wanting to buy the album, Soldier of Love is just the right combination of the classic we love and the new we can embrace.
April 7, 2010 at 9:40 am
Great article. Good writer.