“Out of 31 flavors, baby you make 32 / Let me scoop that on my cone, let me show you what it do.” That’s the first thing you hear on the first proper song of Raheem DeVaughn’s Love Sex Passion. And nope. You’re not getting it out of your head the next time you pull up to a Dairy Queen. For better or for worse. Not a chance.
Yet it’s about as indicative as it gets for DeVaughn as a modern day soul-R&B crooner: He has no problem double-entendre-ing all over the place while maintaining a silky smooth innocence that’s harder to pull off than it looks. R. Kelly? You know that guy’s a freak. Chris Brown? Nobody’s looking at him the same after his very public and very troubling displays of anger. Ginuwine? His best days have probably come and gone. Ne-Yo? Too pop to be sexy. John Legend? Too well-adjusted to get dirty.
Go up and down the list of contemporary male R&B singers and you’ll see: Raheem DeVaughn has carved out a tiny corner for himself in the soul music landscape that’s as perfectly balanced as it gets. He’s socially conscious, yet he has no problem selling a line like “You be the job, I be that work / I be that pipe that make you burst.” He loves empowering the opposite sex with songs like “Woman” and “Queen”, but then he invites Trombone Shorty along to proclaim, “Normally, yeah, you might be a good girl / But tonight if you can be a bad girl / And I won’t care if you don’t care who’s watching.”
A contradiction, maybe, but multi-faceted, undeniably. In fact, that’s what makes Love Sex Passion work as well as it does. “Pretty Lady”, the aforementioned duet with Trombone Shorty, calls upon the NOLA staple’s Raphael Saadiq collaboration “Long Weekend” with its uptempo, retro funk that seems like it was written solely to kick off any block party worth attending. By the time Shorty’s solo comes around, all hands should be in the air and a Soul Train line ought to be forming, shutting down at least three avenues otherwise reserved for transportation.
But, you see, that’s the thing: DeVaughn can go from party to pain on a dime and it works. “Miss Your Sex” and “Baby Come Back” are two illustrations of how smartly he walks that line. Swinging along with a 6/8 time signature, the latter is a piece of desperation that plays like a lost Anthony Hamilton or D’Angelo demo, incorporating live instrumentation that paces back and forth between traditional blues and traditional soul. The former veers into 1980s sultry pop territory that uses a formula someone like Prince once perfected. It’s epic by design, thundering bass drums and tom-toms painting a smoky atmosphere that’s only accentuated by the synths that occasionally soar through the fog.
Elsewhere, DeVaughn finds the sweet spot in the slow-down as good as he ever has. “Never Never Land” recalls the mid-’90s groove of most Jodeci records, its strings adding a layer of beauty essential in any worthy R&B slow jam. “When You Love Somebody” plays off the waltz feel of “Baby Come Back”, the singer sounding just slightly more tortured than he does during the track’s kid sister. Better yet is the electric guitar noodling that gives it an old-school flare. “Love will have you drunk-texting your ex girlfriend at 3 a.m. in the morning,” he sings, not sounding nearly as cheesy as a line like that could appear before hitting you with the payoff line that saves it: “While she’s laying with her new love.”
Ouch.
Don’t let that sentimentality fool you, however. Even “Queen”, the upbeat single, showcases the power and greatness of a woman by way of an upstanding, hardly-broken man. And once that falsetto floats in and out of the verses, you’ll understand precisely how not-bitter the singer is. And then there’s “Countdown To Love”, which is perhaps the set’s most intriguing effort. Mixed in with some retrofitted organ and a slimy groove that might even make Bill Withers smile, it’s a song of anticipatory confidence, each number that passes by being more an indication of intention rather than a request for permission. Tap-dancing his way back and forth between high harmonies and straight-forward commands, it illustrates how versatile and sometimes underrated the guy can be.
Which, all told, is what makes Love Sex Passion such a strong set. Believe it or not, Raheem DeVaughn has been at this for almost 15 years now and this album marks his fifth official full-length release. It’s hard enough to maintain a voice in such an increasingly fickle-consumer climate, let alone have that voice continue to churn out quality, believable songs. Here, there are 17 that make the case for DeVaughn as a legitimate force in the oft-crowded contemporary male R&B world.
There might be 31 flavors to choose from, but with Love Sex Passion, DeVaughn makes the case that his could be one of the best.