I will admit a bit of inconsistency in my way of thinking. Yes, I was a bit put off by Stronger Than Pride because I was expecting another Promise or Diamond Life. Yet when I heard "No Ordinary Love" and heard that Paul Denman's opening throbbing bass and Sade's still-sensuous vocals, I was blown away. Maybe it was because it had been four years and there was a quiet storm needed to counter all the grunge that was crawling from the woodwork (no offense intended to that genre, BTW) So, yes, I accepted the fact that the quartet were a kind of light jazz/R&B hybrid, and "No Ordinary Love", with its yearning, appealing, and affirmation, "I keep crying/I keep trying for you baby/there's nothing like you and I, baby" was the best Sade song I'd heard since the Promise album.

"Feel No Pain" paints a moving portrait of a ghetto family's hardships. All the family has been laid off. Sade pleads for them, "Help them to live life/help them to smile/don't let them stay home and listen to the blues." Done in the group's new style, Andrew Hale's held-down backing synth chords provide the sordid atmosphere. The equating of a job with pride is emphasized in the two contrasting emotions: "do you know how that feels/to walk the street with your head held high/.../did you ever see a man break down?"

The mid-paced and lush "I Couldn't Love You More" is another affirmation of romantic fealty, with piano chords and airy keyboards adding to the atmosphere. Simple lyrics, but effective.

Stuart Matthewman's gentle guitars set the mood for the love lament of "Like A Tattoo". Keyboards come into play when the mood goes up a notch.

The sound of the love celebration "Kiss Of Life" reminds me of some of their Promise material, such as "Tar Baby." The entire band's teamwork really shows up here, and Nick Ingman's strings really add to the loveliness of this tune.

One of their mellower tunes, the love surrender "Cherish The Day" follows, with the airy keyboards and drums predominating. Must be some kinda man to elicit, "You're ruling the way that I move/you take my air."

The melancholy and hearbreaking "Pearls", complete with Ingman's strings and a cello, is about a Somalian woman living a hard life, the blistering sun overhead, searching for pearls. "This is how she's dying/she's dying to survive," sings Sade, and at the same time, lauds her strength. "She lives in a world she didn't choose/and it hurts like brand new shoes." Sade's voice really reaches an emotional peak throughout the song, and especially when she sings "Hallelujah."

The slow "Bullet Proof Soul" uses the love/gun analogy, and the woman says that love hit her like a slow bullet. She then warns the man that only a bullet proof soul can resist her.

The instrumental "Mermaid" conjures up the deep blue ocean, and the otherwordly sounds the fantasy world of mermaids.

I'm still not going to try to explain why I can handle their sound here and not on the previous album. All I can say is that it soothes me. Eight years and four albums and still the same lineup of Adu (vocals), Matthewman (sax), Denman (bass), and Hale (keyboards), so not bad at all. They are tighter and cohesive, yet I notice the gradual buildup of other players on the scene that really took shape in Stronger Than Pride, such as Leroy Osbourne (vocals) and Nick Ingman (string arrangements). I'm unaware of what a near-decade break did for Sade on Lover's Rock, but I'm sure to find out sometime in the future. So a "Pearls"-style "hallelujah" for Love Deluxe!

After kicking off the retro soul movement with Diamond Life (1985) and Promise (1986), and consolidating her quiet storm appeal with Stronger Than Pride (1988), Sade took a lengthy break, beginning a second career of disappearing from her own celebrity. In 1992, she returned with Love Deluxe, a curiously appealing album that marked her apotheosis as the irresistible yet unapproachable queen of laid back, sensual soul. On first hearing, Love Deluxe sounds less radical than it actually is. That's because most artists tend to build on an established style. Here, Sade doesn't build on her tried and tested brand of mellow R&B as much as strips it down by virtually eliminating all the quasi-jazzy excesses that marked (or marred) her previous recordings. Noticeably missing are Stuart Matthewman's sax solos. More prominent is his crunchy electric guitar playing; on the gorgeous opener, No Ordinary Love, it lends an interesting flourish to the song's ethereal lounge atmospherics. Relying more heavily on the electronic medium, notably Paul Denman's growing affinity for synth bass, Sade and her combo crafted a sleek and elegant album that came to be enormously influential on a whole new generation of neo-soul singers down the horizon. Fellow one-namers like Maxwell, Aaliyah, and Pru have cited Sade's influence. Even more underground club acts like Everything But The Girl and Portishead nodded to her as they strove to emulate the group's cool quasi-lounge atmospherics and Sade's strangely sexy deadpan vocals. The world of gangsta rap sent kudos by way of Krayzie Bone's sample of Feel No Pain, Deluxe's London-clubby second track, on his recent album. Despite its endurance, Love Deluxe remains stylistically hard to nail down. Is it R&B, soul, jazz, club, electronic? A lesser band would have made an unfocused mess of an album, but in Sade's capable hands, the styles are seamlessly woven together by her distinctive voice to create one of the most captivating albums of the 90s.

Never has repetition worked so well! From the hypnotic bass groove of the opening "No Ordinary Love" this remarkable band uses space, and the lightest embellishments to wondrous effect. Paul S. Denman anchors every song with some of the most understated yet innovative bass playing ever recorded. His deep, sliding, funky bass playing makes "Feel No Pain" a virtual masterpiece of minimalism, and he gets downright buttery as he hangs in the background on "I Couldn't Love You More" and "Cherish The Day". Stuart Matthewman (guitar & sax) Andrew Hale (keyboards) and the underappreciated Leroy Osborne (backing vocals) help round out this solid, transistional effort. The spare, stripped down funky soundscapes painted here chart the the direction these men would follow 4 years later in Sweetback. Ms. Adu as always is in wonderful voice. Her achingly lovely contralto is front and center on every cut, (the instrumental piece that closes the album being the only exception) and you can actually hear tears in her delivery on tracks like "Cherish The Day", "Kiss Of Life" and the acoustic gem "Like A Tattoo". Not a bad song to be found here, and none of it ever sounds dated or pretentious. A Modern Classic.

No one expected this!

By the early 1990's, Sade's brand of lush pop had given way to hard-edged rap, the techno-dawn was rising on house music, and "new school" r&b was stealing from every direction to keep up with it all.

Sade's last effort (1988's "Pride") had been a directionless and formulaic attempt at marrying Sade's romantic stylings to an ever-so-slight world music influence (time now shines a more kind light on that release...).

When I first got this, I played it once, said "What the Hell is That all About?", and promptly forgot about it. It must have been a month or so later when I heard one of it's tracks unexpectedly and WOKE UP! Sade had not only put a new and fresh spin on her own persona, she and her band had single-handedly pointed the way to every wandering and struggling R&B ensemble in the process. More so than any other early 90*s release, this one layed a blueprint for what was to come.

The unabashed romanticism of the lyrics is geniously offset by the heavily reggae/dub-influenced arrangements. To this day, I do not know nor have any idea where "Cherish the Day" came from. I only know that it's pure magic and literally marked the sun coming up on R&B!!

Like the album's title suggests, you've never heard love quite like this before. Unfortunately, we've all too seldom heard anything like it since. The exceptions would be Maxwell's first and second efforts (produced by Stuart Mattewman of Sade's band), and the Sweetback c.d.'s (actually Sade's band under nom-de-guerre, and including Maxwell on their first effort). As I said, the influence was strongly and widely felt, just not quite captured by anyone else.

"Bulletproof Soul" is right up there with k.d. lang's "Save Me" and all of "Dusty in Memphis" for obsessive love gone wrong, it was one of God's kinder tricks that all three artists were in rotation on my Walkman at the same time. It taught me well and good that Love knows no genre...

OK. For starters, Sade is not a main-stream pop diva like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, or Celine Dionne. In fact there are very few female singers like her: past, present, and future. So if you like any of the previously mentioned cuties, don't purchase any of Sade's albums. Please don't. I beeseech you. Especially this one!

Having said this, Sade is, from my definition, the epitome of what a diva should be: soulful, honest, ethereal, and talented; and Love Deluxe, while not her most accessible album, is by far, I believe, her most emotional and can be felt in each and everyone of her songs. This honesty and soul probably stems from the fact that she writes or co-writes most of her material which creates undeniably personal atmosphere. This album transports me to her world; a very beautiful one indeed!

I simply melt every time I hear "Cherish The Day" and the phrase, "If you were mine/If you were mine/I wouldn't want to go to heaven." Now that's love - pure and simple. And that's what I found in this album: purity and simplicity. That is the formula for life!: purity+simplicity=love and is why, because of my unbridled passion for this LP, it has taken the number three (#3) slot on my "Top Thirteen Albums To Be Buried With" list. If this makes any sense at all to whomever reads this, buy it. You won't regret it. Highlights: I Couldn't Love You More, Like A Tattoo, Cherish The Day, & Bullet Proof Soul.