There's a difference between a song that's merely slow and the kind of ache-y, insinuating melody that makes you forget about everything except the curve of someone's neck. I'll confess right here that sometimes I get it wrong; sometimes I put on some twisted Charles Mingus madness and get myself into one of those pinchy, distracted kisses before I realize what a terrible mistake I've made. One time I brought home a girl who smelled of the most seductive combination of frankincense and Aveda hair gel, and for some reason, I put a jazz vocals album — Diana Krall
I think it was — into the CD player. Who can concentrate over all those clanky, improvisational piano beats and scats? I'd barely managed to get my face buried into Frankincense Girl's freckled flesh when she stopped moving. "What the fuck is this?" she asked, reaching for her glasses. In each instance, only one thing saved my ass: dipping into my box of never-fail booty call music and cueing up anything by, say, D'Angelo or Marvin Gaye.

Lovers Rock, Sade's first album in eight years, probably won't replace "Brown Sugar" or "Sexual Healing" at the top of my collection of music-to-get-busy-by. But the mistress of sweet taboos does return from her hiatus to make seduction sound as attractively effortless as she has in the past. Before hearing the album, you might find yourself more interested in wondering where the forty-one-year-old British diva has been all these years. Most of this wondering will end the moment you turn the thing on. (And there's no way to find out where she's been anyway since she's not talking and the official line from Epic is totally, impenetrably PR-ified: "Sade has tried simply to remain true to herself by . . . only making music when she has something to say.") Where she's been all these years isn't important, you see, because her creamy vocals can clear a path to the bedroom even when they're describing the dimensions of a broken heart. "I'm crying everyone's tears/ . . . There's nothing anyone/ can say to take this away," she throbs on one new song — making me want to light a candle and methodically lick the melancholy off somebody's torso, collarbone to hip crease.

It's best to ignore the album's title: this isn't, contrary to its implication, light rock for the bedroom. The rock Sade's talking about is the kind you find jutting out along the edges of cliffs and banking alongside a secluded lake — "You're the one/ The one that I swim to in a storm/ Like a lovers rock" — not the sort that three guys with a Fender Stratocaster and an drum kit tend to make. On the contrary, Lovers Rock features Sade's signature hybrid of soul, reggae and R&B. Her band still consists of keyboardist Andrew Hale, guitarist Stuart Matthewman and bassist Paul Denman; with their help, she has once more created a string of tropical melodies that make a sturdy home in the low parts of the tonal register.

The album does feature a new, more committed dancehall beat, as well as hip-hop-ish rhythms played acoustically on guitar here and there. But mostly it provides the same sort of understated, beat-happy, heavily produced instrumentation that made Sade a pop sensation when she first started cutting CDs back in the mid-'80s.

It is still Sade's musical delivery of words and emotion — and not the lyrics themselves — that lend her work its sentimental power. The writing on Lovers Rock is largely uninspired; it doesn't help that the words are sometimes squeezed strangely together to fit a lick or a rhyme pattern. On occasion, the lyrics are engaging — "If someone has to lose, I don't want to play" — but mostly they're of the overused, rhyme-desperate, romance variety. This reaches its lowest points when she arches toward conventional rhyming structures, as in "This love's not a liar/ To cold it's a fire," and "Darling . . ./ Whatever may come/ we can get through it/ as if it's just begun."

But somehow none of this matters, because as soon as Sade gets her vocal chords around even the least functional of lyrics, they acquire an emotional precision that most love songs can only dream of. The woman just has a talent for finding the most agreeable way to exploit the rhythmic oddities in a phrase. With her delivery, she makes all those ordinary, overused romantic words — like "disappoint" (as in, "Will I disappoint my future if I stay?") and "forever" ("So shall it be forever") — pound with a rich and thoughtful exactitude. Lurking in the corners of a melody, she extends and shortens words, playing a kind of tug of war with the instrumentation.

So let's say you want to add this to your collection of sexual healing CDs. If I were you, I'd skip right over track 1 ("By Your Side" — the album's first single, and its most radio-ready — is, predictably, the least gratifying song in here) as well as track 2 ("Flow") and get straight into the molasses middle part of this album. Between tracks 3 and 10, the album winds sweetly through a thick loop of passions: first, there's the joy of new love, which gives way to the sorrow of injustice, which is followed by the acid of betrayal, and then joy again. "Somebody Already Broke My Heart" (a catchy lamentation in which Sade's voice glides out sideways along the gloomiest edges of a base line) gives way, for instance, to "All About Our Love" (a calm but giddy track that sounds something like Al Green on a slow ponyride). "Its all about our love," ga-dink, ga-dink, ga-dink, "so shall it be for-ever." This sweetness then yields to "Slave Song," a quiet, political ballad inspired by Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." And then it's back, once again, to the narcotic of giddy love.

Loving, sweet as it is all by itself, seems to require a soundtrack — someone else's lyrics to compare to our own romantic drama, melodies to accompany us as we travel the length of someone else's body, songs that shake free what we feel from our insides. Sade's new music offers that kind of company — undistracted, rhythmic and open-throated. It may not replace my D'Angelo CD, but it will give it a much-needed rest.

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