OLD SMOOTHY

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Do we really want to go back to the '70s? To gas shortages and Watergate, to blaxploitation movies and big lapels, to Charlie's Angels and the Ford Administration? Not really. What makes soul singer-producer-instrumentalist D'Angelo's new album, Brown Sugar, so winning is that he doesn't so much take the listener back to the '70s as update the musical spirit of that time for '90s listeners. His songs have the seductive textures of the R.-and-B. hits of the '70s, evoking Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers, but D'Angelo's style is spare and restrained. Aesthetically, there are no big lapels here.

In a concert last month in New York City, D'Angelo was ushered on stage by his band playing the theme from Shaft. And on his new album he delivers a mellow, unpretentious version of Smokey Robinson's classic Cruisin'. D'Angelo, 21, has a pleasant, floating falsetto, and he shows his vocal skills off well on Cruisin' as well as on the romantic, melodic Me and Those Dreamin' Eyes of Mine. He could, however, work a bit more on his lyrics, which lack the lubricated finesse evident in the rest of his songcraft. On Me and Those Dreamin' Eyes of Mine he sings, banally, "If I had the chance, I'd treat her like a queen." And on one atypically crude song-whose title is too scatological to print here-the chorus consists of curses. It's a little like the Fuhrman tapes, with a beat.

D'Angelo can do better than that. Last year he produced and wrote the funky, hopeful song Overjoyed, which appeared on an album by the Boys Choir of Harlem. And the last number on Brown Sugar is a love song with an uplifting gospel spirit called Higher. "Feels like heaven when I think about you," he sings. "Sparking that love within my soul." It's the best track on the CD. When D'Angelo sets his sights high, musically and spiritually, his aim is true.