This album review takes a closer look at one of the most lucious R&B efforts of the 1990s.
Genre: R&B, Neo-Soul
Label: Columbia
Release Date: April 2, 1996
Vibe: 😮💨
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Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell
Maxwell presented his finished debut album to Columbia Records in the spring of 1995. The label heard it and promptly put it in a drawer.
There were other extenuating circumstances, of course. Columbia has gone through massive restructuring, which both stemmed from and amplified existing in-fighting that persisted in the months after Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite was submitted. But the most interesting (or laughable, depending on your disposition) aspect of the decision was the label’s sudden doubts about the record’s commercial potential. At the time, they didn’t think its sound dovetailed enough with the hip-hop/soul hybrid that was gaining steam on the charts, as witnessed by the sleek sample usage Bad Boy singles. Instead of a product that slotted in seamlessly next to hits of the day, they had a 65-minute slow burn of an R&B record, one replete with jazz-inflected moments of sly seduction. Even the album cover was mysterious. No photo of Maxwell, just a pair of gold heels on a hotel carpet and a track listing. The label's own Black music executives weren't sure their audience would go for it.
It’s a curious case of buyer’s remorse in hindsight. Gerald Maxwell Rivera was a Brooklyn kid, raised by his mother after his father died in a plane crash when he was three years old. At 17, the self-taught instrumentalist began composing his own material, growing his yet-to-be-recorded catalog to over 300 songs. At 19, he was performing at venues all over New York, waiting tables to cover his rent. By his own account, he built a reputation from the ground up, which led to Vibe dubbing him “the next Prince” during the early-90s. In 1994, Columbia signed him to a deal and reluctantly gave him creative control. Despite all that promise, it looked for a minute that his career would be stalled by label insecurity. Uncertainty. Whatever you want to call it.
Then a funny thing happened: D'Angelo's Brown Sugar broke through in 1995 and changed the industry-wide calculus of what soul (or, as it was already being dubbed, “neo-soul”) could accomplish. It wasn’t solely a question of aesthetic similarities, though you’ll find plenty of those if you listen to both of those studio debuts back to back. There was an auteurist angle to the mystique behind Maxwell and D’Angelo’s respective outputs. You can through other artists into that mix, too, like Erykah Badu and J Dilla, but the notion of an uncompromising vision began to emerge as a selling point. Like D’Angelo, Maxwell was a perfectionist and understood that genuine greatness require him to treat this album as a suite, not a collection of pre-packaged singles. It had to be performed live, with real musicians, and respectful of the long line of soul gamechangers who’d blazed the trail for him. The fact that Urban Hang Suite was released April 2, 1996, which would have been Marvin Gaye's 57th birthday, was not accidental
The album opens with "The Urban Theme," nearly three minutes of instrumental funk that establishes the temperature before Maxwell sings a note. Wah Wah Watson's guitar and the saxophone lick create a distinctive space and lets you luxuriate in it. The sequence then moves forward in a deliberate arc: attraction through "Welcome," desire through "Sumthin' Sumthin'," declaration through "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)," consummation through "...Til the Cops Come Knockin'," and then the longer, harder territory of commitment, doubt, and resolution through the album's final third. It moves like a cohesive narrative, one where the tempo changes in relation to the central relationship’s progression. It’s a choice one critic specifically attributed to Stuart Matthewman's production influence (he’d been assigned by Columbia to work on the record with Maxwell but only ended up working on a handful of final tracks).
"Sumthin' Sumthin'" is the first place where Maxwell's musical range becomes fully visible. Leon Ware co-wrote it. Ware, who had co-written and produced Marvin Gaye's 1976 masterpiece I Want You and co-written Minnie Riperton's "Inside My Love," brought chord structures more complex than most R&B was reaching for at that moment. The groove under "Sumthin' Sumthin'" is deceptively sophisticated, built on a bass line that doesn't resolve where you expect. Wah Wah Watson's guitar is fluid and warm. Maxwell's vocal stays restrained in the verses and opens in the hook just enough to let you understand the stakes. The song peaked at number 22 on the Hot Dance Music chart. Its success was modest relative to its quality, but its placement in the Love Jones soundtrack in 1997 extended its reach considerably.
"Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)" was the record's commercial engine. Co-written with Itaal Shur, it hit number 36 on the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at number 8 on the R&B chart. The single shipped 500,000 copies by October 1996 and its momentum lifted the entire album. The production here is lighter than the album's center of gravity, built for radio in a way the surrounding tracks aren't, but Maxwell's falsetto on the chorus lands with a conviction that makes the song feel less like a calculated radio move and more like the one moment on the record where he lets the guardrail down completely. Then there's "...Til the Cops Come Knockin'." It was the track from his original demo that made it to the album, the one that creates palpable heat through compression rather than volume. The tempo locks in and never flinches, while Maxwell's vocal delivery is closer to Teddy Pendergrass’ growl than to Marvin Gaye’s croon. The restraint that defines the rest of the record is borne from this composition, and the effect is utterly disarming.
Urban Hang Suite debuted at No. 38 on the R&B album chart and moved upwards from there. The first single, "...Til the Cops Come Knockin'," while brilliant, only peaked No. 79, which caused Columbia to waver internally. Then "Ascension" dropped in July, helping the LP earn a Gold certification by September of that year an hit Platinum status the following year, in 1997. The album spent 78 weeks on the Billboard 200, leading to Maxwell selling out Radio City Music Hall for three consecutive nights. At the Soul Train Awards, he won Best Male R&B/Soul Album, Best Male R&B/Soul Single, and Best New Artist. He was officially a fixutre of R&B’s present and future. Astonishingly, the Grammy for Best R&B Album in his awards year went to The Tony Rich Project's Words, a fine record that’s hasn’t left a cultural footprint anywhere as large as Maxwell has. Go figure.
The commercial story of this album extended long past its initial lifecycle. Along with Brown Sugar and 1997’s Baduizm (1997), Maxwell's contribution to neo-soul is irreplicable. Urban Hang Suite was a designed object, meant to be experienced as a complete thing. Artists who absorbed that lesson include The Weeknd, who has cited Maxwell directly as a formative influence, along with a broader wave of alternative R&B artists in the 2010s who took the emotional restraint and the negative space between notes as a production dogma. You can hear this album's DNA in Frank Ocean's formal ambitions, in Miguel's approach to falsetto and arrangement, in the general proposition that R&B could be made to feel literary without losing its physicality.