voodoo

Five years would pass before its follow-up, “Voodoo,” catapulted him to a level of fame that made him retreat from the public until 2014, when he returned with the more politically infused funk-fest of “Black Messiah.”

Raphael Saadiq, his co-producer on “Voodoo,” had been working with him on a fourth album.

“Voodoo,” though, announced D’Angelo as the inheritor of a lineage stretching back centuries, opening with ceremonial drums and fatback bass thump, traveling through the raw verbal dirty talk of Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man and Redman on “Left and Right.”

There’s an apocryphal story of a critic likening a Jimi Hendrix performance to “listening to heavy metal falling from the sky”; the guitar riffs throughout “Voodoo” pay homage to that rock god by refining the platinum left at that crash site and floating it back to heaven.

It captures the sensation of being in his orbit as opposed to focusing on any explanations of all that occurred between “Voodoo” and “Black Messiah.”