[louder]

Originally Posted by Severian

Thanks for making a nice, classic café post louder. I was beginning to forget this thread existed.

I agree with you 100% of course. Even though Black Messiah is nowhere near my favorite album of the decade (that honor would have to go to MBDTF or possibly something I'm totally blanking on at the moment... Public Strain maybe? Reflecting the Light? The Seer? Nah... almost certainly MBDTF) it is certainly an album that only grows larger and larger in my estimation with the passage of time.

It was actually incredibly difficult for me to appropriately rate the album for the year of its release, since it dropped in 2014. My impulse was to make it too 3, and it definitely wound up in the top 10, but I had a hard time justifying placing it above albums that had had more time to prove their worth.

I don't find it a particularly epic album. I find that I'm not deeply connected to it emotionally. Instead, like a great jazz album, I find that listening to it is never a bad choice. It's soothing and it's organic and it has the fragile perfection of a soulful Beatles ballad ("Don't let me down" with Billy Preston comes to mind), or an enigmatic but well-balanced experimental pop game-changer (like perhaps Prince's Sign O The Times).

If I were to rate 2014's albums now, I'd put Black Messiah above everything except for Syro (what can I say, I've followed and adored and awaited the return of RDJ as Aphex Twin just as you have with D'angelo). More than A U R O R A or Bécs or 9 Songs or MyLittleGhost, Black Messiah imprinted on me from the very first listen. Since then my feelings for it have only grown stronger.

I'm willing to bet that it will be in my top 10 of the decade. And frankly, I believe I prefer it to Voodoo. The sound of Black Messiah is less a product of a moment in the evolution of a genre than its predecessors. Instead, it's like a crystal clear snapshot of one of the world's greatest artists at his absolute best. If any note was struck differently, it make for an entirely different experience, making BM an extremely personal, immediate and of the moment piece of work. Like a journal entry. It's imperfections, if it had any, help make it perfect.

Word.

Wish I could rep you back. Spot on with the "Don't Let Me Down" comparsion, I can definitely hear it.