Sade: A Skeletal 'Soldier Of Love'
by OLIVER WANG
Ever since Sade Adu first appeared in the mid-1980s, the singer and her band have perfected their own brand of sensual slow jam — equal parts luscious and languorous. With the gentlest of arrangements and Adu's silken voice, Sade's best songs glimmer with the warmth of the afterglow, like the last moments between sex and sleep.
It's safe to say that Sade doesn't constantly seek to radically reinvent herself, despite extraordinary breaks of eight to ten years between recent albums. That kind of consistency is both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, there's something to be said for staying faithful to a particular aesthetic, and few pop acts have been better at that than Sade. Adu's voice does much of the work here — she has a distinct coolness to her timbre, a penchant for elongating her vowels and an accented inflection that have become her signatures over the years, whether in the new "The Moon and the Sky" or in 1984's "Smooth Operator."
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