Word: adu
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...lost the use of my heart / But I’m still alive,” sings Sade Adu on the titular track from “Soldier of Love,” Sade’s first album since 2000. For an impressively constructed album based on and made for “love,” this line seems more of a curious apology from the band than a testament to love from a wayward lover...
...Adu has a uniquely withdrawn yet powerful vocal style. Unfortunately, many of the songs are so mindlessly bland that it is easy to mistake her tasteful emoting for unfeeling coldness. “Morning Bird” is one of the few tracks which highlights and supports her unique vocals. The song traces a staggering piano figure down the sinewy and reserved melodic fragments that Adu shakes down with melancholic elegance. Here, her lack of obvious emoting benefits the song and her voice sounds more powerful than on most. The percussion is minimal—a tambourine shivering over...
...overbearing, keep the song from reaching the emotional peaks for which it aspires. A smoky upright bass pattern lightly supports the Sunday-afternoon strumming of the laconic acoustic and the waves of organ that sweep through the wide-open spaces of the song like wind in fields of grain. Adu pulls off some memorable melodies, making use of her powerful and malleable voice, but the track somehow feels distant and merely pleasant. The instruments still sound prepackaged and the chord changes, while effective, remain obvious. The production, though nearly flawless, places more of an emotional divide between the band...
...study in subtle vocal performances and multi-layered production. However, Sade’s most heinous shortcoming is their surgical extraction of almost all the soul from music that, if nothing else, should be powered by emotion, no matter how trite. On “Babyfather,” Adu sings, “So love, they say, makes you feel this way.” In the cold context of the album, the line sounds uncertain and second-hand. It seems as if Sade is attempting to hedge their bets with unfeelingly vague definitions of love and safely dulled...
...mere presence of such world-class talent could potentially frighten internationally inexperienced players. But even though the U.S. squad has its share of professionals, with players in MLS (such as Freddy Adu and Jozy Altidore), in Italy (Gabriel Ferrari), and in the senior national team (Michael Bradley), it is Akpan whose four goals in pre-World Cup friendlies leads the team this year...