Erykah Badu threw a ferocious curve ball with her fourth record, 2008's New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), swapping her organic, expansive neo-soul for the schizophrenic hip-hop breaks and druggy loops of underground hip-hop producers like Madlib and 9th Wonder. Critics went nuts for it, heralding it as one of the year's best, but I wasn't able to connect with it. It was a dense, rambling and deliberately challenging album that, instead of playing to Badu's considerable strengths, attempted an imitation of Georgia Anne Muldrow's outsider soul.
So, frankly, I wasn't much looking forward to a New Amerykah Part Two, but it turns out that Badu's latest, though it pairs her with many of the same collaborators, is more a counterpoint to her last album than a continuation. Where Part One was tightly wound, teeming with social and political angst, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) is loose and easygoing, freeing Badu to sing from her heart instead of her head. She opens up like seldom before, singing of chasing lovers or chasing them away, depending on her mood. Even when she's at her most guarded, as when she warns "you don't want to fall in love with me" on the blunt "Fall in Love (Your Funeral)," there's such sweetness in her voice that you can't blame her suitor for chancing it.
Badu has seldom sounded as charming and chipper as she does on this set, and the music further fuels her good cheer, strutting amicably to the re-purposed analogue grooves of '70s soul-jazz, with none of Part One's chilly breaks or claustrophobic overload. After a decade marked by long hiatuses and daring experimentation, Badu has recorded what might be the most playful, inviting album of her career.
