Sometimes you just wish Meshell Ndegeocello would play a song that has an identifiable instrumental melody, but the last thing she's about is conventional song forms.

On her latest album, the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter emphasizes groove, bottom and hooks, but she seems to be able to work endlessly inventive results from her musical alchemy. She also weaves some spellbinding vocals that wrestle with such subjects as spirituality and religion, redemption, evolution, sexuality, self-image and politics, as well as outer and inner space. It's a heady and potentially pretentious combination, but Ndegeocello grounds it in a strong sense of personality and those insistent grooves.

Her new album is something of a "stone soup" affair. She is ably assisted in her funk-soul pursuits by an assortment of jazz all-stars, including saxophonist Oliver Lake, pianist Robert Glasper, guitarists Brandon Ross and Pat Metheny, cornetist Graham Haynes and flutist James Newton.

Lake contributes some amazing shards of alto sax soloing to "Virgo," but most surprising is Newton, who escorts "Lovely Lovely" with some not-cloying flute

"Relief: A Stripper Classic" is an achingly naked plea for intimacy and kindness after beauty fades, the drugs and alcohol run out and we've exhausted our exercises in tawdry human game-playing. It's a touching finish to a challenging album. -- Gene Armstrong, Tucson Weekly, 10/11/07.

Meshell Ndegeocello is my girl! And on her new album, "The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams" she weaves funk, jazz, rock and hip-hop (not to mention that silky voice) into a dreamy style that's all her own. -- Ernest Jasmin, Tacoma News Tribune, 10/10/07.

from okayplayer...

"Meshell Ndegeocello
The World Has Made Me the Man Of My Dreams
Emarcy/UMGD; 2007
(Four stars)

Typical.
Ndegeocello that is, whatever that is. For her seventh studio effort, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, the bassist/vocalist has mainstreamed a (prog)rock sensibility into her (in)famously eclectic repertoire, driving her long-running audio confessional apocalyptically high and soul deep.

Topically, World is classically Ndegeocello, moving restlessly between her long-running trio of themes – sex, religion, and sociocultural norm. Rich writing territory, no doubt, but a territory that she’s been able revisit so frequently, so insistently only because she sees unstable, changeable relationships where other artists see self-evident truths (if they see anything at all). Her songs in an intentionally contradictory mathematical set: {sex, religion, norm: sex > (religion + norm); sex = religion; sex = norm; religion = norm; sex = norm = religion; norm > religion; (norm + sex) > religion; (religion = sex) > norm; religion; sex; norm; religion).

World’s intro, “Haditha,” sets the trio in motion again: Ndegeocello– the sexualized female singer warned of by Muslim soothsayers – appears as a sign of the apocalypse, and, as a sign of the apocalypse, a pathway to redemption (ours and hers); we exit this world (“The Sloganeer: Paradise” and “Evolution”); we set-out on a deep-space journey, presumably to heaven but also through some sort of deep emotional fulfillment (middle half of the album, more or less), only to end up locked in a uneasy relationship with an unnamed lover, who might be God, a man, or a woman (“Relief: A Stripper Classic,” “A Different Girl Every Night”). Have we escaped? Have we arrived? Has our rocketship arched back to our wrecked planet in flames?

World’s potency – like that of much of Ndegeocello’s work – doesn’t come from its tortured intellectuality, but instead, from how deeply felt – and more importantly, feelable – her intellectuality is… as if there were little space between her mind and body and even less between her and the listener. In part, this intimacy comes from her frank transformation of personal experience into lyric. More and more, however, it comes from her musical arrangements, which have come a long way from the postured attitude of Plantation Lullabies. World, particularly its stellar middle clutch of “Elliptical” and “Shirk,” is powerfully musically emotive, swinging back and forth between aggressive, fevered guitar stabs and dreamy dissolving sonic washes. Sy Smith and Oumou Sangare add their own gripping vocals to the mix, but at the center of it all is Ndegeocello, projecting a seething, swirling aura that’s as inviting as it’s horrifying.

Yeah, horrifying. An album that connects this viscerally takes its emotional toll over a much-longer-seeming 48 minutes. The musical ping-ponging in World’s second half, which sets in right as drifty “Shirk” transitions into the hard-driving “Article 3,” keeps listeners from ever fully settling into the album, sort of like cresting the top of a rollercoaster only to feel your body lifting out of the seat – it’s all fun and adrenaline until you get flung off. Depending on your interest – bracing emotional experience or enduring recording – this incredibly real feeling of barely controlled emotional rise and fall makes or breaks the album. Ndegeocello’s virtuosity is undeniable if you have a pulse; the question is whether you can gather yourself up enough times to give World the sheer number of spins most albums need to get the homey, lived-in feeling of a classic… or even that of a (simply) well loved effort. For those wondering if Ndegeocello will ever get her “due,” the preceding also seems to hold true for the rest of her catalog: over the course of the last 13 years, she’s constructed an artistic experience that’s so emotionally intense it’s almost damaging to touch.

World isn’t a dark album; it’s also not a bright album. It’s like watching fireworks erupt over a glassy river through the jagged bottom of a broken brown beer bottle, after having spun around so much you can’t tell the difference between the water and the sky, up and down. It’s dizzying, it’s chaotic, it’s bloodying, it’s exhausting. And it’s beautiful, whatever it is.

- T.M. Wolf"

"On her just-released seventh album, the provocatively titled 'The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams,' Ndegeocello is in near-peak form. She benefits from the contributions of musicians who share her genre-leaping proclivities, such as Malian vocal star Oumou Sangare and jazz greats Pat Metheny and James Newton.

At its best, which is often, 'The World' sets the bar for what a great new Prince album should sound like (that is, if Prince was still interested in pushing the envelope)." -- George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/11/07.

"Unlike, say, Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello is not weighed down by unrealistic expectations to resurrect some long-lost soul movement. Ndegeocello's fans expect her to go far out, and she does. 'The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams' sounds like what the Black Rock Coalition should have been: rat-a-tat drum cracks that hit harder than drum and bass, and Ndegeocello's own tough, rhapsodic bass licks. Sci-fi motifs such as 'The Sloganeer: Paradise' compare modern life to suicide. And yet, in 'Headline,' she stakes her claim to pleasure, singing, I do some right, I do some wrong/I pray to let life guide me, while criticizing the gossips who cannibalize media figures who live by those rules. And, of course, there are the love songs that seem more deep and sensuous than anything heard before. What earthly joy and pleasure, she sings on 'Lovely Lovely.' I'm grateful, so grateful." (4 stars) -- Mosi Reeves, Creative Loafing, 9/20-9/26/07.

Someone let Mosi know that it's "Michelle Johnson" (formerly "Blacknuss"), not "Headline" with those lyrics. Oh wait, I already sort of did

Meshell Ndegeocello ... is a German-born American singer, songwriter, rapper, bassist, and multi-instrumentalist. She has been hailed in the music press as a redeemer of soul music. Her music incorporates funk, soul, hip hop, reggae, R&B, rock, and jazz. She has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards." [via Wikipedia] On her seventh full-length recording, Meshell has brought the inebriating subtleties of Comfort Woman and the algebraic jazz complexities of The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel together with the fierce incisiveness of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape to produce a truly innovative, hard-hitting, world challenging work of art that speaks with a blunt, poetic elegance to the life we have been given, the life we have made, the life we wish we had, the life we've fooled ourselves about. The world has made me the man of my dreams is consistently brilliant. It is a hard brilliance, like that of a diamond, polished by Meshell's wide range of emotion and amazing lyrical prowess. Although the Web sample of TWHMMTMOMD's music is somewhat degraded by file compression, and the nuances of her vocals are all but lost because of it, it is good enough to point out the direction Meshell has taken: mind-blowing/eye-opening. Check it: Evolution No eyes No more tears to cry No tongue to hurt you Be angry or lie Golden wings to fly Seek shelter I'll find you next lifetime Evolution's end Evolution's ending We'll burn beneath the sun We'll burn beneath the sun
--stumbleupon.com

Just got the cd from Amazon yesterday (yeah I went through this website - no worries ) I absolutely love it! It's powerful, sexy and mind blowing. Some of her best stuff. I thought it was interesting though to hear some of her old sounds on one of the tracks (the title is escaping me right now...?). Seems although she changes her sound every album as she grows, every once in a while she throws in a ..."signature" sound I guess you could say.

A powerful, real woman - I respect her...

Hoping one day she will come to Pittsburgh...?? Or that I can save enough to take a road trip...I would love to see her live!

Yesterday's USA Today (10/16/07, p 4D)

MN-TWHMMTMOMD
3.5 out of 4 stars (I think the best is 4...)
"GENRE TRANSCENDER" it says in the categorization area
"Singer / bassist Ndegeocello's music has never been easy to categorize, and her seventh opus is no different. She bends and blends genres with ease while exploring such themes as love, politics, religion and self-discovery. The music here doesn't come in easily digestible sound bites, but is presented as a full sonic meal that is well worth the indulgence. - Jones

Download: Michelle Johnson, The Sloganeer: Paradise, Solomon

Skip: Virgo, Shirk"

http://blogs.usatoday.com/listenup/2007/10/this-weeks-re-2.html

Anyway if "something" can't be made of alllll this popular critical acclaim... I don't know what...

Still, having got into it some more, it's clearly not her strongest effort. The impact was lessened by a year of having the EP and there are some incredible, perspective widdening gems (per usual), but I agree that Virgo is a bit weak... "Shirk" is actually really good, I think. I thought the political theme was more sustained on the EP and Shirk is a piece of that (but I too have not met Capt Gerard...).

Need a few more solid front-to-back album exposures not on headphones too, but isn't that the problem... just one of the many signs, including women singers, of the "end of times"... at least according to the sloganeers...

Unfortunately have to miss the show next week in SF despite having tickets... Soon again I hope!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CoSo,

Never an artist prone to complacency or taking the easy path to pop stardom, Meshell Ndegeocello has outdone herself on her stunning new album, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca). It's a tour de force that adeptly juggles an easy dozen musical genres—funk to psychedelia to jazz—into a complex realm of shifting rhythms, constantly evolving textures, gut-wrenching grooves, and spacey sound washes. The rich, resounding thump of Ndegeocello's own bass usually leads the way for a revolving cast of characters notably including jazz musicians Oliver Lake, James Newton, and Pat Metheny, as well as Malian singer Oumou Sangare. Ndegeocello's lyrics are equally ambitious, seemingly tackling no less than the current state of existence; a kind of spiritual quest that encompasses politics, desire, love and death, creation and evolution, Andromeda and the devil. The album is so dense with ideas and musical concepts that a couple of listens barely scratches the surface. But there's plenty to lure you in, whether the sizzling sci-fi funk of "Soul Spaceship," the snaky soul/funk/jazz glide of "Lovely Lovely," or the ragged, punky careen of "Article 3." -- Rick Mason, Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, 11/15/07.

In Meshell Ndegeocello’s universe, planets are ethereal beats, spare melodies and odd time signatures that expand and contract like the soundtrack to a journey through the cosmos. Leading off with an echoey warning about the future of music, movement and sex against a backdrop of electronic sound, “Hidatha”’s out-there ambience is a misleading premise given the album’s accessible mix of jazz, metal and rock. “The Sloganeer: Paradise” adds Scott Mann and Chad Royce’s new wavy beats to a dark admonition about suicide and desire. Other tracks showcase the breathiest spectrum of Ndegeocello’s vocal skills, her voice employing the same delicate R&B vibe she applies to her guitar, bass and organ work. Despite a predominance of delicate, clean rhythms, the music can also get manic, (“Article 3”) as collaborators Pat Metheny and Robert Glasper recall their fusion chops or when “Shirk” benefits from Oumou Sangare’s hauntingly high-strung voice. Channeling a post-punk universe of drum programming, dark emotions and weighty ideas about faith and existence, the album lives up to the bonus track’s title, “Soul Spaceship.” -- Jennifer Odell, Relix Magazine, 12/06/07.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s journey through genre and sound continues on her fantastic new CD, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca Label Group), an Afro-punk soul-jazz-rock hybrid whose thematic concerns (social injustice, spiritual struggles and salvation, wounds inflicted by family, lovers and society) are the same ones she’s wrestled throughout her career. Working with folks like Doyle Bramhall II, Pat Metheny, Sy Smith and Oliver Lake, she’s pushed her sound and sometimes elliptical lyrics to a place where she often comes off as a stepdaughter of Sun Ra. Don’t be put off by the gratingly affected Brit-punk accent she uses in the opening lines of the track, “The Sloganeer: Paradise.” What follows is so very real. -- Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly, 11/07/07.

"More than 300 CDs and DVDs arrived at my desk this year and only a handful were inspiring, complex and entertaining enough to remain in regular rotation – My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreux (Keith Jarrett), Graduation (Kanye West), River: The Joni Mitchell Letters (Herbie Hancock) and The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Meshell Ndegeocello)." -- Ashante Infantry, Toronto Sun, 12/27/07.

Best Albums Of 2007
10. “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams” Meshell Ndegeocello: You never know what you’ll get with the daring, talented and occasionally confounding Ndegeocello. Will it be artsy, hip-hop inflused R&B? A collection of dreary anti-love songs? A fusion jazz album with no lyrics? Her latest, genre-blurring effort is best described as phantasmagoric funk as Ndegeocello takes a spiritual journey through love, lust and religious fanaticism. -- Ernest Jasmin, Tacoma News Tribune, 12/27/07.

whats up folks...hope everyone is having a good holiday whichever ones you celebrate (or i at least hope yer having a good weekend if ya don't celebrate any particular holiday heheh). Heres another nice review...

"Meshell Ndegeocello
The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams
(Emarcy)
US release date: 25 September 2007
UK release date: 24 September 2007
by Will Layman

Meshell Ndegeocello is a pop anomaly, a supremely talented artist who has the goods to be truly popular but also has the ideology and integrity to doggedly follow her own path. The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, her seventh full-length album, is a fully mature and integrated record that makes the case that popular art can be both popular and artistic at the same time.

When Meshell burst on the scene in 1993 as among first new artists singed to Madonna’s “Maverick” label, she seemed like a female Sly Stone. She had undeniable grooves and a point of view on sex, race, politics, and society. That she scored one of 1994’s best singles (and videos) in duet with John Mellencamp on a cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” suggested that Meshell, a husky-voiced female African-American bass player with a close-shaved head, was the unlikeliest popular artist in America.

But by her third album, Meshell had proven resistant to either easy categorization or popular magnetism. Meshell’s aesthetic is less rhythm-and-blues or rock than it is art music that happens to use popular forms. Almost all her music is densely layered, like a polyrhythmic West African drum composition, with a sandwich of sounds and noises: instruments electric and acoustic, samples, vocal tracks in all registers and timbres, looped percussion, and otherworldly synthesis. But, from disc to disc, Meshell also genre-hopped with two funky R&B records (Plantations Lullabies, then Peace Beyond Passion), a down-hearted neo-folk album (Bitter), a groove-based hip-hop experiment (Cookie: an Anthropological Mixtape, a funk-cum-dub workout (Comfort Woman), then an outright jazz record (The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel). Fans greeted each mutation with joy and concern. Will the world finally (re) discover Ndegeocello? Will Ndegeocello finally strike for the popular jugular?

The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams is the most diverse and complete and complex work yet for Meshell. It is possibly a career highlight, a masterwork, but it is so bold and dense that it promises a generously greater tomorrow. Summarizing it would be pointless and impossible. It contains every aspect of Meshell’s career without seeming disconnected or jerky. It is like a long meal served by a multi-talented chef in which appetizers, meats and fish, delicate vegetables and pungent stews, pastries and cheeses, all hooked gloriously together.

“The Sloganeer: Paradise” grabs the ear like early Meshell. Her bass playing, rubbery, rocking, mutable, is out front along with killer drum work. She sings beautifully and ironically about a culture that sells bullshit to the point of driving us to suicide ("Can you imagine . . . utter nothingness?"), but the politics is subordinate to the groove and a set of dramatic drum breaks that stop the heart even as they shake the ass. “Elliptical” is just as memorable but utterly different. Set over an odd time signature, the tune uses mystical imagery, a guest vocalist, hand percussion, and harmonies that float as well as ring through a vocoder. When the tune sets the table for a lovely cornet solo by Graham Haynes, it’s hard to understand how the trick was turned, but it was.

The seeming cul-de-sac of Ndegeocello’s previous record, on which she barely sang and mainly featured out-jazz-cats such as Oliver Lake, turns out, here, to have been a necessary journey. “Virgo” is built on a horn line stated by flute, alto saxophone, and trombone, then turns into a fairly snappy pop tune. “Lovely Lovely” mixes flute improvising by Oliver Lake with a call-and-response groove between electric bass and organ. Then “Shirk” brings in the distinctive acoustic guitar of Pat Metheny to accompany a duet between Meshell and Oumou Sangare. The brilliant young jazz pianist Robert Glasper, who has found the rare meeting place between true acoustic jazz and hip-hop, collaborates on “Relief: A Stripper Classic”, which brings a Hendrix-like crunch to bear on a soundscape of whispers, croons, and yearning spirituality. Glasper’s piano part in the second half of the tune brings the disc to a wonderfully nostalgic close, as Meshell asks, “Will you comfort me?”

These lyric concerns about God, about sexuality, about romance and politics and the uncomfortable intersection between all these topics are as mashed-up and complex as the music. Ndegeocello is certainly savvy enough to know that she has matched her words and lyrics deftly but such that each makes the other something to be worked through and explored in every crevice. This is an artist who knows she is creating something of the pop market but not really for the pop market. It is, thus, that rare piece of pop art both ambitiously “high” and unpretentiously “low”, a perfectly American kind of genius.

Man of My Dreams is a mature summary of a career in post-modern soul. It is Meshell Ndegeocello’s most complete and fully integrated record and a defining work that in evading category seems to generate its own rules of engagement and enjoyment.

9 out of 10 stars"

She is totally forgiven for that John Mellencamp situation.

"Sounding less like the jazz-funk chanteuse of old, Ndegeocello incorporates melodic post-punk à la TV on the Radio and channels Funkadelic's acidic guitar on her seventh album. Along with songs from a 2006 EP, she furthers her lyrical and thematic focus on religion and sex in tunes like 'Evolution' and 'Virgo.' While guitarist Pat Metheny joins in on the subdued 'Shirk' and the Bad Brains-y 'Article 3,' the album works best when Ndegeocello, bass in hand, relentlessly attacks the groove on 'Michelle Johnson' and 'Solomon.'" -- 3 out of 5 stars, Ely Delman, Spin Magazine, 12/27/07.

The World Has Made Me The Man Of My Dreams - musical salvation from an artist's artist.

Meshell Ndegeocello's new record is a magnum opus that could very well do what Smells Like Teen Spirit did in the early 90s. There are very few records I've listened to that take you where this one will. Most special about this record is that, once again (like Bitter in 1999), this Meshell record comes along at a very poignant time for me, personally speaking.

Each track on this album progresses very effectively into the next, and after a couple listens, a storyline of redemption and being newly created becomes evident. However, the turns the album takes in the second half are most surprising. I purchased the iTunes version of this album, and got the two bonus tracks, Soul Spaceship and A Different Girl, and that version of the album reconciles well, but if not for those two, the way Relief... ends would be very unsettling and almost cruel. What else can be said about a song that ends sounding like skipping record, just when it seems okay for the main question/theme ("will you comfort me?") to be asked.

But that's life. Just when you feel like it's okay to ask something that you've been dying to ask, the situation changes.

Maybe this album is a little too personal for me? I dunno. Despite this ending, there is enough going on in the album to make it an album that you want to go right ahead and listen to again. Songs like Evolution (we'll burn beneath the sun), Article 3 (did the funky creatures from Return Of the Jedi get hired to sing on this track? I'm kidding, but that's what it sounds like to me, and it works!), and The Sloganeer revv the listener up very, very well.

The personal angle on this is that it came into my life at a time when there I didn't feel much certainty that I'd be alive in a year's time. Suffice to say that viscerally, TWHMMTMOMD could fit in with NIN's The Downward Spiral, Prince's 1999, or Engineers' 2005 eponymous debut. Thank you, Meshell!

"Meshell Ndegeocello has never been for the faint of heart. Even at her mellowest best, 1999’s Bitter, she’s a challenging artist, be it her brutally honest lyrics, or her formidable and daring songwriting. She’s a PR department’s nightmare, but a music fan’s dream. I have to admit to having lost touch with with her music a little since ’02’s Cookie. But she’s been far from sitting on her hands.

Her latest, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, won’t find itself anywhere near the top of a Billboard Chart, unless they have a chart for awesome/challenging/religiously ambiguous Jazz/funk/punk/r’n'b fusion, which I’m fairly certain they don’t.

Gone are the brutally direct lyrics of Peace Beyond Passion and Bitter, replaced with something else again, “I received a message from God/in the form of a rainbow/Instructions from Captain Gerard, he said: See how they respond when you make love.” And where PBP had a strong sense of her personal struggle with Christianity and it’s acceptance of her and minorities in general, The World. . . deals quite pointedly with Islam. In places in a similar fashion to PBP, in others in the context of world politics and Terrorism.

Musically, it touches on moments from her entire career, while adding some serious aggression and sheer volume. The second cut, The Sloganeer: Paradise, does it’s best Bloc Party impersonation. Although I’m not sure they’ve ever sung anything close to “Get a bang out of life/Suicide, straight to paradise/If you’re the chosen why/Don’t you kill yourself now/I hate all the beautiful people.”

The album never lets you settle in for long in one genre. The second you start to get your head around an extended Jazz groove and solo, suddenly a pure acoustic ballad appears, and before you get to comfortable with that, an odd-time, aggressive “fusion in a good way, not a bad keyboards and musical willy waving way” track appears to put you on the back foot again.

It’s music that you need to actively listen to. You won’t drive around with your buddies singing along to this, you’ll be by yourself, you’ll be reflecting, you’ll be blown away, and you’ll definitely be richer for the experience." -- David M, Score Magazine, 04/18/08.

"With 'The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams', Ndegeocello has found a way to balance her increasingly religious Muslim life with music that is both accessible and true to her experimental jazz nature. "Article 3" features Pat Metheny on guitar." -- Gregg Shapiro, Bay Area Reporter, 04/17/08.