Heartbreak is a constant in popular music, and with good reason; Maxwell is among the billions across the globe who have had their hearts broken at one time or another, but his latest record, BLACKsummers'night, is a deeply moving and evocative record that finds the singer expounding on this universal feeling like few can. The record misses frequent collaborator Stuart Matthewman and initially has an almost underwhelming live-performance feel when compared with his older records. But while it lacks the iconic significance of his debut, BLACKsummers'night is a record more than worthy of Maxwell's talents, because it trades the physical sensuality of his earlier work for a deep emotional resonance, the performance of an artist whose focus and attention to detail gives his expression a singular veracity.
Maxwell's debut, Urban Hang Suite, is one of the top R&B records of the 1990s. Back then the young, precocious singer wielded an introverted, understated persona; he seemed to have a profound understanding of himself with a quiet-spoken reserve that, when blended with incredibly crafted songwriting, came across as confidence. Here was an artist who seemed to have shaped every chord change for maximum emotional effectiveness. Maxwell was also a performer who knew that songwriting was not simply writing melodies and chord progressions, but could be structurally ambitious, with the kind of consistent unpredictability and subversiveness of the song form, embracing the unexpected, like the sudden crash after the long pause in the middle of Urban Hang Suite's "Dancewitme". His latest record finds these kinds of details, this external, broad-perspective view of what "composition" really means, the love of intricacies, its best songs balancing compositional excellence, development, and tension, with carefully designed moods that reflect or complement each work's lyrical focus.
Take "Help Somebody", for example: Maxwell begs the listener to show love, turning such feelings into a moral imperative, tension ratcheting with a gradual build, musically searching for release that never comes, a long hopeless cry to force logic to intrude over irrational feeling. Maxwell's power is least effective when he loses this composed structure; "Stop the World" reaches for raw, unrehearsed expression, but without organization, it feels listless. By contrast "Fistful of Tears" is anchored by a Prince-inflected quarter-note harmony waltz; not coincidentally, it's also the album's most immediately affecting track.
Although Maxwell has always seemed preternaturally mature, there is something new here, a depth of emotion appropriate for this level of heartbreak. "Pretty Wings", the lead single and album centerpiece, doesn't work in simple binaries or reductive ideas; it lays out a fair yet confused examination of a relationship's fall. Maxwell even acknowledges his own mistakes after an indictment of his partner's, creating a realization of loss and all of the intricate personal responses that implies. But what is truly powerful is that it is just as musically complex as a relationship's disintegration is emotionally. Maxwell's patience allows him to effectively write such paens to devotion; it is as if he wanted to catalog every aspect of this very human breakdown, identify each strand to create a song that fully captures, laid bare, the complex emotional terrain that wells up during such an exceptionally difficult and human experience. This level of detail carries with it a lived-in feeling, a convincing truthfulness simply because the emotions are too specific to be anything but real. Music this effective is difficult, and only someone as passionate about music as they are the human heart could so successfully produce work that reflects well on both.
