Few of you can have missed it. Erykah Badu just put out her fifth album New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh on the back of an online marketing campaign Barry Gordy could not have imagined. Fans who may have been discouraged by the dense and experimental New Amerykah Part I (4th World War) will have rushed to get their hands on the sequel, professed to be more “organic” by The Queen herself; more in line with her 1997 debut Baduizm.

And those fans will have been rewarded. The second part of the New Amerykah trilogy is dominated by the funk and jazz influences most have come to expect, with persistent electronic noises reminding us that we’re in Erykah-land, where time is undefined. The album is perky, spontaneous and youthful (damn near infantile on ‘Turn Me Away (Get Money)’) where the last was dark and calm. Its lyrics are more about relationships and individuality than civil paranoia and the war in Iraq.

‘Window Seat’ is the essential airplane groove served by James Poyser and Questlove, while Madlib provides one of many thumping basslines on ‘Umm Hmm’. Of course, Erykah would not be Erykah without her detours into skit-like melodies-cum-songs. ‘Agitation,’ delivered by Shafiq of Sa-Ra is just intense enough and the final, ten-minute deliberation ‘Out My Mind, Just In Time’ describing a cycle of falling in and out of love works too.

The Ankh represents life in Egyptian mythology, and here it graces the title, and cover of an album full of vitality. In fact, in the timeless realm inhabited by Badu, life and death seem to converge. Notable resurrections on this album include Junior Mafia and Tupac on ‘Turn Me Away (Get Money)’; Biggie himself (“It’s gon’ be a lot of slow singing…”) on ‘Fall In Love (Your Funeral)’; Eddie Kendricks through the umpteenth flip of his ‘Intimate Friends’; and, of course, the late great J Dilla, whose contribution on ‘Love’ has apparently not been used elsewhere. It’s not the album of the decade, but Badu is back to old form, which in itself says a lot.

words Sven Carlsson