Coast to coast: The best of Sade

Fortunately my generation has never had trouble accepting Sade. Besides, it’s Sade whom we have to thank for Maxwell.

1. Promise (1985)

Released at the peak of the High Reagan Era, Sade’s second album earns its title. By keeping their ear attuned to the rhythmic experiments in American R&B, where even the ballads were, akin to mercury in water, getting harder, the band gradually let go of the lounge club signifiers. Soon lounge club music would sound like Promise. Two of Sade’s most ebullient tunes grace this record: when on “Tar Baby” Stuart Matthewman plays a high lick after Adu sings, “You can turn into the song,” it’s a subtle, charming bow to the enigma of the band’s chemistry; and “The Sweetest Taboo,” nervous with excitement. “Maureen” mourns the end of a friendship whose warmth and empathy continue to amaze Adu. In another class is “Never As Good as the First Time,” which anticipates the fin de siecle angst and use of space of the Bristol acts (“practically a philosophical treatise on diminishing returns,” Lena Friesen remarked). They chickened out by not subbing the extended remix.

2. Diamond Life (1984)

Style Council, Everything But the Girl — these colleagues and competitors come up as correlatives to Adu’s elegance. But none of them spent careers drilling a hole into cinder block, their focus unceasing. They were mercurial. Sade shed some of their live drumming and saxes, but otherwise Diamond Life is the kind of debut satisfying to casual fans. Not another word needs to be written about “Your Love is King” or “Smooth Operator. Instead, let me dwell on their cover of “Why Can’t We Live Together.” Over a spare arrangement comprised of bass tugs, a sustained organ wash that occasionally bestirs itself into stabs, and Sade’s beloved bongos, Adu plays with the expressive possibilities of the phrase “Everybody wants to live together.” In later years on their own material she wouldn’t be so strident; she would insert blue notes.

3. Love Deluxe (1992)

“No Ordinary Love” is the only trip-hop single to chart in the American top thirty. That unspooling, politely upset guitar? The drums mixed without a bottom end? Why it didn’t go top ten before it went into recurrent play for years remains one of those Poppy Bush Interzone mysteries. Indeed, it’s the way in which the band programs the drum machines that gives Love Deluxe its potency. Adu’s characters are wounded, not crushed, and those drums affirm their resolve (“Cherish the Day”). “The arrangements bend around Adu’s voice, its narcotic pull, the way that its range sounds finely sifted out of other potential vocal material, perfectly decanted,” Brad Nelson wrote in 2017.

4. Stronger Than Pride (1988)

The bass lines are thick and confident (“Turn My Back on You”) — that’s what struck me in my first listen in years. What at the time sounded like the slightest of Sade’s eighties albums has become the most influential. Bryan Ferry’s contemporaneous Bete Noire is the only album working a similar mood: rue given a reason to persist thanks to the rolling grooves; vocals treated as second guitars or third keyboard lines. Bet The Weeknd and Drake listened closely. No one has yet sampled “Paradise,” her last American top twenty single, and what the hell are they waiting for? “Paradise” and “Give It Up” are strong evidence for declaring Stronger Than Pride the best bongo record in pop history.

5. Soldier of Love (2010)

Then, as sales for artists collapsed in the download era, Sade emerged from a decade of silence, sold almost a million copies of her latest album the first week. The title track, her best single since “No Ordinary Love,” catches the ear without hesitation: a stop-start martial rhythm and an intermittent, harsh power chord strum arranged like a sample, allowing Adu to get away scot-free with the florid lyric about the “hinterland” of her emotions. In “Skin” the smooth operator Adu celebrated in 1984 has evolved into a dirty bugger who probably does unspeakable things to her with candle wax and aromatic lotions. The band’s previous efforts at demonstrating a social conscience pale before “Babyfather,” the first Sade song in which she acknowledges the consequences of so much noble hand-wringing in boudoirs. A loping quasi-reggae beat cushions the funny-sad story, with echoes of Stronger Than Pride‘s “Clean Heart,” of a love child whom Adu notices because, of course, he’s a reminder of the father/lover who abandoned them. “Your daddy knows” the background vocals chant, to which Adu answers “your flame.” It’s almost as devastating as the chorus fillip “Your daddy don’t come with a lifetime guarantee.”

Then she disappeared again.

6. Lovers Rock (2000)

Transformed at last into the aural wallpaper her skeptics accused her of, she accepts the fact as if it were description, not criticism; the drum programs are an idea of rhythm, not rhythm. “By Your Side” became the standard, the rest got overlooked. “Immigrant,” with its worried synth strings, has acquired new poignancy. “I wonder if I can let this grief go,” she wails, uncharacteristically, on “King of Sorrow.”

BEST TRACKS

1. Never As Good as the First Time
2. The Sweetest Taboo
3. Smooth Operator
4. Soldier of Love
5. No Ordinary Love
6. Paradise
7. Maureen
8. By Your Side
9. Hang On to Your Love
10. Love is Stronger than Pride
11. Your Love is King
12. Babyfather
13. Feel No Pain
14. Turn My Back on You
15. Tar Baby
16. Immigrant
17. Nothing Can Come Between Us
18. Cherish the Day
19. Skin
20. Kiss of Life