Seal: Human Being : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

With his rippled six-foot-three body shouldering a face marked by scars that could be teenidol stigmata, you can't quite hate Seal because he's beautiful. Maybe that's why he has always seemed to be something more than a Trevor Horn-produced pop star – a tragic Shakespeare-an hero, maybe, or a soul singer, at least. He has a handsome Al Green rasp of a voice; he sounds like a gospel singer trapped in a very carnal body, and he composes with the earnest intensity of Marvin Gaye. Seal releases albums with the slow deliberation of rock royalty rather than with the cash-in haste of a newcomer to the charts. Human Being, his third album in seven years (and the first that's not titled Seal), proffers a glimpse into that much-coveted Holy Grail: the soul of a hunk.

As indicated by the album title, Seal wants us to realize he's just one of us. Copping the bass groove from Marianne Faithfull's "Broken English," "Human Beings" has an almost psychedelic funkiness which shows that Seal has moved well beyond his house-music days to a sort of acousto-techno plain where guitars, dance beats and strings peacefully coexist. This is a serious, moody album wherein Seal yearns for deliverance and finds it as often in earthly love as in the spiritual. And yet, as these songs lose their steam in favor of smoothness and one quiet-storm ballad merges into the next, you have to wonder: Would we like Seal as much if he looked like Michael Bolton?