Brian McKnight’s last album, Just Me, came out in 2011. So there’s no story here, no built-in narrative ready for hyping by the celebrity-industrial complex. No story, that is, beyond this: More Than Words is great. Really great. So great that unless D’Angelo gets around to completing his long-awaited return to music, it might end up the best R&B album of the year.
Producing himself, McKnight moves freely through textures and eras, riding a sleek synth pulse in 4th of July, boosting a bluesy guitar lick for the title track and pulling off an uncanny approximation of Steely Dan’s Deacon Blues in Get U 2 Stay. In Letsomebodyloveu, his singing recalls the exasperated croon of one-time Steely Dan vocalist Michael McDonald.
McKnight flexes his know-how with tart juxtapositions, as in the Middle Eastern-accented Slow and Don’t Stop, which conjoins funk-style slap bass with gauzy keyboards out of the late-1990s British dance music known as 2-step. Offering up unexpected chord changes and winding instrumental detours, it’s the sound of a master on the job.
Yet McKnight keeps his songs modest, almost self-effacing in their outlook. Over the bouncy, Hall & Oates-ish groove in She Doesn’t Know, he describes his totally implementable plan to woo a woman who “works in the cubicle next to me.”
And although Made for Love opens with McKnight rolling down Sunset Boulevard in his Alfa Romeo, he and a lady friend are soon taking “a left on La Cienega / Toward the Beverly Centre” in search of a place to eat: “I suggested Wokcano,” he sings, referring to the Asian-fusion spot on West 3rd Street, “You said that was just perfect.”
The small-scale specifics are deeply endearing, as they are in Get U 2 Stay, where McKnight describes himself not as a sex god or a creative genius but as a “golfball-hitting machine.” You get the sense that the sport is played to be won; it’s just another field to dominate.
McKnight on the overlooked More Than Words simply feels like a lover of the game, a champion minus his title.
