SADE (HELEN FOLASADE ADU) — Diamond Life (review)

SADE (HELEN FOLASADE ADU) — Diamond Life album cover Album · 1984 · RnB Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
First a few precisions to correct some very widespread and persistent misconceptions. Sade is not the Nigerian-born singer in herself, but well an British group made of a constant line-up that writes its own material and has taken its name from part of one of their female singer’s middle name. Indeed, the real leader of this band is the guitarist/saxman Stuart Matthewson, and he is by Andrew Hale on keyboards, Paul Denman on bass and of course the delightful creature of Helen Folasade Adu on vocals and lyrics. Their music is a gentler generally mainstream quality jazz/pop that somehow managed to dominate the synthesized dreck that “graced” that dreaded decade. Sade’s stunning physical presence and silky voice was a sure-fire asset for the band, and more than one of their video-clip received heavy rotation on that equally-dreaded MTV crap channel.

And the band struck gold right from their debut album, with some outstanding soft-porn jazz-pop like the awesome opening Smooth Operator, the no-less killer-slow Your Love Is King, the languorous Cherry Pie, and more. And when I said quality, I really meant quality as keyboardist Hale uses in the dreaded mid-80’s some Fender Rhodes and some awesome Hammond-organ (even Winwood didn’t dare to back then), instead of these crappy digital-synth garbage with memory banks. Ok, not all the tracks are of the quality of the afore-mentioned hits, but there are no stinkers duds or fillers on this album. For that matter Diamond Life closes on the album’s best track, the Montgomery-penned Why Can’t We Live Together in one of the best version I’ve heard so far (along with Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express version), and the band show their instrumental depth here, where they couldn’t in the more standard verse-chorus songs of the rest of the album.

Sonically, we’re not that far away from Steely Dan’s poppier jazzy pop, but without Becker or Fagen’s depth in lyrics or tricky songwriting. Well if you’re like and really dislike the general sound of the 80’s, but you want to shut the tasteless 80’s pop junkies, you can always counter with classy pop/rock/jazz groups like Dire Straits or Sade, the very few artistes that did manage to fill the void left by the quality breakdown in the mainstream public tastes (ie: Phil Collins, Madonna, Prince, Wham, Lionel R, and Miiiiiiiiichael J). So brace yourself, because you won’t see me rate an 80’s album that high, even in the jazz or prog realm.

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