Devil's Halo

Background

Ndegéocello spent over a year writing the songs from Devil's Halo, being inspired in part by her trip to Ireland. "I went to a couple of pubs and there were much older gentlemen playing the guitar and just singing these amazing, simple songs", Ndegéocello recalled. "I really admired that. I wanted to get to that kind of place where the song could just exist with a guitar and a vocal." With Icelandic audio engineer S. Husky Höskulds, Ndegéocello proceeded to record the album in seven days, backed by a band that featured guitarist Chris Bruce, keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, and drummer Deantoni Parks. She later credited them with providing her inspiration and critique while keeping her "clear about what is the real focus—in life and in music". Their instruments were recorded live without digital post-production, which New York Times critic Ben Ratliff said contributed to the music's raw and organic sound.

Music and lyrics

According to The Boston Globe's Sarah Rodman, Devil's Halo featured a "catholicity of sounds". Ndegéocello performed in what Nick Coleman of The Independent described as "the alt-rock idiom", while Slant Magazine's Matthew Cole called Devil's Halo an R&B record that utilized textures from experimental rock and electronica. Jacqueline Smith from The New Zealand Herald said its fusion of styles was based in soul music: "Though it channelled everyone from Sade to Santana, it's an album of mostly soul - of the soul-baring kind". AllMusic's Thom Jurek found the record's "soulish, near-pop, rock tunes" starker than her previous three albums.

For the song "Slaughter", Ndegéocello tried to weave together sonic influences from the producers Trevor Horn and RZA, as well as the bands Yes, Sade, and The Human League: "That's what I tried to achieve in this particular recording: some sonic tapestries that people, even if they're not listening to the lyrics, could just feel or hear, or just have a deep, inner dialogue with." She covered Ready for the World's 1986 song "Love You Down", deconstructing it into what Village Voice critic Eugene Holley Jr. described as "a stripper's classic". Songs such as "Mass Transit" and "White Girl" featured Ndegéocello's characteristic ska and reggae influenced basslines; Holley argued that Caribbean riddims and country-rock guitar grooves underpinned the music, serving as a backdrop for Ndegéocello's contralto singing throughout Devil's Halo. In the opinion of Ed Potton from The Times, her voice "resided somewhere between Sade and PJ Harvey".

The main theme of Devil's Halo, City Pages critic Rick Mason said, was the treachery of love and its bitter effects, with songs Holley described as brimming with "spiritual complexity and ambiguity". In Jurek's opinion, "romance, substance abuse, and one woman speaking candidly to another are themes in this musical meditation on bliss, lust, loneliness, and emotional wreckage". musicOMH journalist Andrew Burgess described the record's content as "achingly sensual and brutally violent", while Seattle Weekly's Saby Reyes-Kulkami wrote "isolation—even more than the sexual charge the songs exude—serves as the linchpin that pushes her narrators to strive for connection in the first place." According to The Huffington Post's Mike Ragogna, while the music covered styles ranging from pop and quiet storm to "light" avant-garde, the subject matter had a "low key/high concept" quality expressed through terse lyrics, sonic experiments, and character studies such as "Lola" and "White Girl".

"Lola" was written as a critique of mainstream societal treatment of romantic love and heartbreak society. "A wife’s just a whore with a diamond ring", Ndegéocello's sang. She drew inspiration from matchmaking reality television shows that presented love as a "really clear exchange". "I hear young women going 'well if he can buy me something'", Ndegéocello explained. "That song—'Put It in the Bag'—which is based on 'can you buy me some things?' And then the male counterpart, all he can really talk about is sex and if the woman can cook. And it’s funny to me. That you're no more than a whore, you just have a wedding ring." "Bright Shiny Morning" was titled after the book of the same name by James Frey. Ndegéocello wrote the song after reflecting on her past lies and misrepresentations, particularly those she made in an attempt to be accepted in the music industry. "People change themselves", she said. "Almost in the sense of creating mental anguish in order to make other people happy and to obtain celebrity and fame. That's why the lyric is 'you do anything.' Some people do anything for their big dreams of sunshine."

Release and reception

Devil's Halo was released by Downtown Records on October 6, 2009, to generally positive reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 78, based on seven reviews. In Billboard, Gary Graff wrote that the record "neatly straddles a line between challenging and accessible", featuring some of Ndegéocello's strongest compositions yet. Jurek claimed she "hasn't been so nakedly vulnerable and brazenly honest on record as she is here". Tyler Lewis of PopMatters hailed it as her most consistent and "emotionally potent work" since 1999's Bitter while adding that Devil's Halo featured "a greater sense of perspective of life's realities". According to Q, the songs expressing frantic feelings were balanced by "unpredictable but always apposite moments of beauty". Salon journalist Heather Havrilesky said "like a world-weary muse, Ndegéocello taps into something rich and melancholy at the sludgy bottom of our hearts" while possessing a "mellow depth" in her singing. Washington Post critic Mark Jenkins believed the music's "stripped-down approach accentuated her musical brawn". Noel Murray from The A.V. Club found the album "bracingly unpredictable and persistently enjoyable; it's an art-soul record for those who like to be challenged while they’re tapping their toes. Or vice versa".

In a less enthusiastic review, Andy Gill of The Independent believed the eclectic style on Devil's Halo sounded muddled: "The songs seem to bleed into one another, with too much pointlessly flashy playing leading to polite jazz-rock hell. One's left yearning for a hummable melody that might imprint one of these songs upon one's memory". Mojo wrote that while the lyrics to "her songs are as politically charged as ever, musically they're laboured experiments in style". Robert Christgau from MSN Music was even less receptive, rating the album a "dud", which indicated "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought".

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.