Voodoo

D'ANGELO may have made his audience wait five years for the follow-up to his acclaimed debut Brown Sugar, but it serves as a timely panacea for the increasingly moribund genre of "urban" R&B (the very mention of which reminds me of that excellent old joke on Larry Sanders: "No, we can't have Wu-Tang Clan performing on Friday night, they're too urban for us." "Hey, what about Lenny Kravitz? He's only half-urban.").

Unlike his debut, which sometimes sacrificed atmospherics for lushness, Voodoo is all very minimalist, heavily swathed in the feel of a loose-limbed jam session in a darkened studio. The four-piece band is augmented by, of all people, Pino Palladino - a session muso who made a lot of money in the 1980s playing fretless bass on innumerable dreadful records; the anti-Peter Hook, basically.

Palladino, in fairness, keeps his usual four-string excesses to himself throughout Voodoo, doubtless under duress from the main man. Adhering to the same sense of uncluttered minimalism, D'Angelo never overdoes his own vocals, steering clear of the unappealing loverman-isms of R Kelly and the like. On some tracks, his appealing falsetto calls Curtis Mayfield to mind; on others, he strongly resembles Prince circa 'Kiss'.

On the best tracks on Voodoo such as the fluid, effortless aqua-funk of 'The Line' and the wonderfully adroit 'Untitled (How Does It Feel)', he comes on like a male Erykah Badu, exhibiting the same awareness of when to hold back and let the song do the work. The cover of Bad Company's 'Feel Like Makin' Love', always a really bombastic tune, would surely have been a disaster in the hands of most other contemporary soul vocalists, but not this guy.

Nearly every track clocks in at seven minutes or more, resulting in a ridiculous running time of 78 minutes. But on the whole, this is a seriously impressive record.