If you play this at the proper volume on the right system, the aromatic candles and incense will light themselves, and the sheets will turn to 10,000 thread count silk. “If I Made Love to You” finds DeVaughn telling his lover that he’ll play all the slow jams and quiet storm ballads for them, before unleashing a falsetto that can stop space and time. The post-modern commentary seductively fused into a warm-hearted nostalgia. Listening to the lead single, “When a Man,” you intuit the sweat and soulful anguish of the hardest working man in show business. It is a tribute to the artists who came before him: all those aforementioned names, plus Parliament and Prince. In Lovesick, the Love King has built a vessel to transport you to a different, better time. Paak.Ĭredit DeVaughn for making the extraordinary feel effortless. Still, it’s testament to the Michigan native’s versatility and emotional depth he has turned a sonic left turn into an eternal groove - an expansion that feels reminiscent of DJ Premier producing for D’Angelo, Salaam Remi collaborating with Amy Winehouse, J Dilla’s bible material with Erykah Badu, or more recently, Knxlwdge’s NxWorries project with. Released on Mello Music, Lovesick is a stylistic departure from Apollo Brown’s cold-blooded 21st century boom-bap, but it shouldn’t come as a shock considering his historical skill at soulful sample chopping.
It is an album that bears the echoes of Jodeci and James Brown, but it is ultimately the clarion vision of two masters of their respective forms. Yet it doesn’t sound out of step alongside DeVaughn’s peers The-Dream, Anderson.
It is a work of startling beauty, a blend of modern R&B, classic soul, and guttural funk that recalls Smokey Robinson, Al Green, and Marvin Gaye. Lovesick is a collaboration between the 3x Grammy-nominated singer Raheem DeVaughn and the legendary hip-hop producer, Apollo Brown, best known for making hip-hop so grimy that it permanently lodges in your lungs and underneath your fingernails.
With it, you get something like Lovesick. R&B is the genre, but soul is the yearning, the lust, the regret.
Hip-Hop isn’t soul, but it’s the most fundamental component of its DNA. Soul isn’t the blues, but the best blues has soul. It can’t be borrowed or traded, bequeathed or imitated (no matter how much they try). It is a timeless idea and an immortal condition.
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