D'Angelo is back, with deific might

After a 14-year absence marked by cataclysmic falls from grace and various false-start comebacks, D'Angelo's new album, "Black Messiah," dropped out of the heavens Sunday night.

Play it once with your eyes closed, and you'll hear something almost paralyzing - a survivor on the rebound of all rebounds, excavating new spiritual truths from unknown depths. It's as if he sank so low that he finally discovered the ocean floor of American soul music, and then started drilling.

This album communicates its complexity with immediacy and finesse - proof that this is the same D'Angelo who left us hanging back in 2000 with "Voodoo," an ecstatic masterstroke that many feared might end up becoming his swan song. Now 40, the man has released the most poignant and powerful album of his life, putting him in the running for the greatest comeback story popular music has ever seen.

In case you forgot, he rose up in the mid-'90s amid a generation of neo-soul singers brave enough to revisit the stratosphere originally mapped out by Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and other R&B deities. These '90s rookies made some exceptional albums and got seriously freaked out by fame. Maxwell, Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo each responded to the turbulence of stardom with unexpected vanishing acts, with D'Angelo receding the farthest, returning to his native Richmond, Virginia, and tumbling into drug abuse.

So when he started touring again in 2012, we all exhaled and smiled. Up onstage, he didn't seem interested in resuscitating his celebrity. He was just taking this music thing out for another spin. He looked happy and healthy, and he wasn't in any kind of hurry.

But despite all of the optimistic vibes that came radiating off that tour, it doesn't make the unannounced release of "Black Messiah" on Sunday night any less gobsmacking - especially because this album does what so few eternally postponed comeback albums do. Instead of feeling heavy with expectation, it feels weightless in its delivery, sophisticated in its detail and urgent in its fury.

As a singer, the auteur is still forging fresh melodic relationships, multitracking his voice to create vocal harmonies that carry anomalous magic. You can tell that he has labored over these songs, but he makes herculean agony feel so effortless - and not even in a show-offy, Prince kind of way. At its best, his music sounds more like an act of nature than an exercise of human creativity.

As a lyricist, he has never been more commanding. Collaborating with rapper Q-Tip and songwriter Kendra Foster, he sends heavy political messages out on airy grooves, such as during "The Charade," a wounded funk song about the invisible burdens of being black in America. "All we wanted was a chance to talk," he sings on the refrain. "'Stead we only got outlined in chalk."

This is a deeply political album, and in the liner notes circulating online, D'Angelo explains its provocative title: "It's about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. ... 'Black Messiah' is not one man. It's a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader."

After more than a decade in the shadows, his timing feels right. With demonstrators across the country protesting decisions in Missouri and New York to not indict the police officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, it's as if D'Angelo had been saving these songs for when America needed to hear them most.

And in another sense, the timing doesn't really matter at all. "Black Messiah" is an album that instantly asserts its consequence and vows to stick around, eliciting bliss, stoking awe, urging us on, reminding us of what music can do.