It is the only R&B record I’ve ever heard that’s submerged as it is. Made primarily as a reaction to his own debut album, Embrya has few previous models for its itself. It was as if had he had opened a window in his urban hang suite and the ocean poured in. The songs he wrote for Embrya respond to this inner stubbornness, loosen themselves from their points, spread and pale like watercolors. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, “What I did with, on purpose, was that it was the anti-Afro ’70s funk-soul record.” He resisted the notion that his music could be pinned down and examined, and he seemed to want to write music that could circulate forever, that slipped away from any attempt to capture it, like a wave of water or an anxious thought. Now he wanted the sound he had pulled from the past to follow him and bend around whichever corner he turned. His debut, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, modeled itself after records like Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, linked sequences of seduction that either blossomed toward or shrank away from the possibility of love it eventually sold two million copies and earned Maxwell a Grammy nod. When Maxwell arrived on radio and MTV in 1996, he brought a sound back with him, the quietly storming soul music of the late-’70s and early-’80s, a genre that could hover politely in the air between neighbors at a cookout or totally collapse the air between two people in a bedroom.
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