MUSIC . Hang The DJ

AmErykah the Beautiful

REVIEW: Erykah Badu's New AmErykah Part II: Return of the Ankh


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Published: Mar 30, 2010

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New AmErykah Part II: Return of the Ankh groans to life slowly, a low digital blip surging and swelling, opening up like a synthetic yawn, after which the record rubs its eyes and rises, somewhat lazily, to life. The follow-up to 2007's spectacular Part I: 4th World War, Ankh trades that record's panicked vision of the future and voracious stylistic appetite for mostly loose, ambling, jazz-informed R&B. It's hard to blame Badu for wanting to lighten the mood: At its bleakest (and best), Part I imagined "Momma hopped up on cocaine/ Daddy on spaceships with no brain." The closest its sequel comes to that kind of mania is a playful interstitial where Badu briefly embodies a philandering lover.

Since the release of the astonishing Mama's Gun a full 10 years ago, Badu has emerged as one of the most compelling and inventive figures in R&B. She eschews choruses for sweetly intoned chants, favoring rubbery bass lines and muted percussion to the hard, obvious thwack of her contemporaries. Most of the songs on Ankh are built around a single lyric repeated to hypnotic effect. In the steady-gurgling "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)," Badu coos "I'll be your robot girl" slyly to her intended. Later, in "Love," atop a mild '70s funk backdrop, she incants, "Never ever met another lover quite like you/ Thought I fell in love with Superman, it's true" over and over until the words take on a nearly spiritual significance.

These two examples speak to the album's primary concerns: chiefly, love and devotion, and — albeit indirectly — how those virtues might combat the bleakness explored in Part I. So it's no wonder things have slowed down a bit: Badu doesn't do outright jubilation so much as prolonged, hazy-eyed ecstasy, and much of Ankh aims for a kind of mystic transcendence. To use Badu's own discography as a reference, it's the Worldwide Underground to its predecessor's Mama's Gun, and even if it's no less creative, it feels just a bit slighter. Perhaps in Badu's universe, the calm comes after the storm.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)