Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part 2 (Return of the Ankh)

LA RECENSIONE

It's music for warm organs, a spontaneous yet controlled flow, making you feel like the musicians are coming and going in the room, in an intimate dimension that is more meditated in Chamber Music Society by Esperanza Spalding.

The tracks could flow continuously, anchored on the liquid horizons of the Fender Rhodes punctuated by bass and drums (the rhythmic device reduced to the essential that has created legions of devotees along the live path of Baduizm), ready to follow Badu's vocal evolutions, now hoarse (alcoholic suggestions of *Me and my Gin* in the opening track "20 Feet Tall" mellowed in Badu's herbal tea room), elsewhere meowing, seductive, spiced with the inherent mischief of colored sirens, Nina/Eunice as a young girl in the new century, all precipitated into the wonderous cauldron of the seventies...

The glue is Erykah's personality and her disarming emotional sincerity. The main tributes are “Agitation” or “Just As I Thought” from the namesake work of David Sancious (E-Street Band), a soap bubble to reflect on in a loop, and “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long”, which uses a sample of “Arrow Through Me” from Back to the Egg by Paul McCartney & Wings.

“New Ameryka Part 2 etc.” is easy to drink yet impossible to define: slow-funk? nu-soul? hip hop? chill lounge cosmic jazz for a private club on Mars, next to the one inaugurated 40 years ago by Gong? : eccentric and comfortable, it won't disturb you as long as you want to hear it. However, if “Umm Hmm” and “Love” mainstream with high added value don't please you, and the dreamy “Incense” accompanied by Celtic harp leads you to reflect for too long on the usefulness of including it in the album, well, Badu is not for you.

Badu's one and multiple synthesis is in the suite, almost a concentrate of the whole work, “Out My Mind, Just In Time”, where, like birds and children, she demonstrates her ability to fly high, in a journey starting from Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, passing through Billie Holiday and arriving at Shirley Horn and Nina Simone, to look out over unexplored grounds, because - part of the strength and determination in the artist's creative self-sufficiency, who takes care, for example, of the album packaging, the writing and direction of videos up to makeup, beard, and hair - “I can rise from the ashes up to 20 feet”.

J’adore.