Sorry. Been an odd week…

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[6.75]

Anthony Easton: It’s spring, so I am in the midst of the jackrabbit fuck portion of the year, but when fall comes and it’s a little chilly, and I haven’t found a husband yet, I will be listening to this basically non stop.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: Apparently this is a cover, but from the first notes of fingerpicked guitar, I can’t envision anyone but Sade crooning this gentle heartbreak. The scattered electric guitar and piano fill out the soundscape without overpowering the vocals. It’s as if “The Moon and the Sky” had been remixed with Santana instead of Jay-Z.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Transforming Thin Lizzy’s classic into a piece of languor-soul is as audacious as any Bryan Ferry attempt at same, and it’s actually a livelier track than most anything on Soldier of Love — not since “By Your Side” have they made their aural creaminess this sensual. Because I can’t quite believe Sade Adu is unaware that she prefers running her fingernails on her bare arms for hours over the company of someone else, I had some difficulty, as usual, appreciating how shrewdly she and her bandmates manipulate distance.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: The lyrics semi-spamsite for this is full of exclamation points, yet I hear no exclamation points anywhere on the track. It’s a shame, because this is a situation that perhaps might merit a damn exclamation point! As a consolation, we get Sade’s tentative delivery, a lot of wavering commas, maybe, which is another way to react to such a thing, if you react with commas. But then there’s the track itself that is a long unbroken sentence without dynamics or emotion or any sort of mitigating punctuation that would make it resemble anything close to the reaction one would have unless one is so completely lobotomized of all feeling that being still in love with someone would not even register as a problem because it would not register at all. See how boring that was to read? Yeah.
[5]

John Seroff: All good Sade songs tend to sound good equally. The critical listener has to be careful not to be fooled by the encroaching sense of deja vu: yes, these are new chimes, a new shaken rainstick, another laconic blue flamenco guitar melody but despite all evidence, you have not yet inhaled this particular smoke. Then the soft, well trodden path to the worn leather couch and cashmere wrap of Sade’s voice, still the same as it was in junior high. You say it’s a cover? It’s a snug one, warm and comfy as it ever was.
[8]

Jer Fairall: “Baby Father” didn’t make my Top 10 Singles list last year, but it should have. Blame my idiotic self-consciousness over an artist that I previously considered, if not The Enemy, than certainly someone who courted my indifference as aggressively as it is possible to court indifference for my last-minute preference of a sprawling Titus Andronicus anthem over Sade’s calm, lovely ode to fatherhood, a song that reliably causes me to smile as broadly as my face will allow each time I hear it. It makes me want to hear Sade with new ears, to find sustenance where I had only previously found boredom. It almost happens. She sounds yearning and even slightly pained here, rather than merely decorative, and the washes of electric guitar that creep in enhance the usual Sade-like atmosphere of restraint that I now, for the first time, actually hear as defensive and sad rather than austere and oppressive. But I still feel like I’m hearing a step back from what “Baby Father” promised, a Sade-by-numbers wisp rather than a veteran artist finally dipping further into the deeper well of possibilities always there but rarely explored. Pleasant as it is, she can do something like “Still In Love with You” in her sleep, which is why she will continue to be accused of doing just that.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Lucinda Williams just tried the same trick. A somnolent blues groove and a lyric boiled down from an agglomeration of every song ever isn’t going to cut it. Not when you can do as much better as Sade can.
[4]

Zach Lyon: I have never even come close to connecting with the sounds of the Sade brand — smooth jazz-soul/quiet storm always recalls for me the music they play in movie theaters before the stuff before the stuff before the previews start. When the screen is just black. Until now! It’s probably Diddy’s fault that my mind is suddenly open to the possibilities of Sade, but this is wonderful. It just took getting past my initial groans over the guitar to hear that there is more genuine-sounding heartbreak in her voice than I’ve heard in just about anything this year. The call on me baby part is almost too much for me.
[8]