Terence Trent D'Arby

It's tough to recall just how famous Terence Trent D'Arby was supposed to be. He was the great post-everything soul hope, a black American living in En gland with a Napoleonic sense of pop destiny, Eurotrash pretensions, and really amazing plaited braids. Packaged as a shiny new Prince at a time when one didn't seem nearly enough, this dude was slated to be more popular than Jesus. You might have noticed this didn't really come to pass, although the guy is no less (but no more) brilliant now than he was then.

Columbia probably suspected something was up with his first album title, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby. A pastiche of Europop slickness, soulman croon, and mild funk, Introducing is just dripping with look-ladies-no-hands ambition. In fact, the ambition is all you hear in spots; his Sam Cookeish voice is spotless, but most of songs ("If You Let Me Stay," "Rain") bounce right past. Ballsy enough to include a five-minute a cappella tune called "As Yet Unnamed," an excellent Smokey Robinson cover ( "Who's Lovin' You"), and two terrific singles. "Wishing Well," with its sex-shuffle rhythm and whistling hook, is a keeper, but the man's finest hour is "Sign Your Name," a slow burner that smolders like Sade and that got hands under blouses at middle school dances the nation over.

Unimpressed with market validation and looking to make an even grander statement, D'Arby turned his ambitions up to deafening levels and released the semibaffling Neither Fish Nor Flesh two years later. An overtly experimental, cranky mishmash that makes the Beatles' White Album look precision-tooled, Neither Fish can't concentrate D'Arby's obvious talents on a single musical idea for more than one tune. Song by song, the uneven collection has aged fairly well, considering the drubbing it took at the time. But as an album, Fish meanders, moving from unfortunate Staxish soul ("I'll Be Alright") to a sharply realized schoolboy R&B tune about AIDS ("Billy Don't Fall") to rockabilly riffs and "To Know Someone Deeply Is to Know Someone Softly," a frictionless slice of bedroom soul R. Kelly has clearly listened to about a million times. Some critics found his scope visionary if diffuse, and his voice still aces, but most of Hardline's fan base were flummoxed by the thing and moved on with their lives.

D'Arby took some time off to figure out where it all went horribly wrong and returned with Symphony or Damn. Neither a techno-fish nor entirely flesh, less ditzy yet still diverse, Symphony hangs together quite well, finding voice and focus for his neon messiah complexes. "Penelope Please" holds on to 17 as long as he can, "Turn the Page" uses the Funky Drummer break in the service of blissful Britpop, and he even scored a minor hit with the glammy is-he-talking-about-a-blowjob-or-what? rocker "She Kissed Me." And yet, the masses stayed away in droves.

1995's Vibrator is dedicated to Muhammad Ali and "all the underappreciated giants still in our midst like for example Todd Rundgren, Bobby Womack, and Kate Bush," rendering reviews pretty much moot. It's more of Symphony's chromium soul rock -- the guy's pretty much found a sound he likes -- but for the first time a D'Arby album sounds samey and indistinct; Vibrator swings the pendulum of eclecticism too far back. Symphony if you do or damned if you don't, I guess.

Unless someone figures out how to get people to shell out for his often limitless talents -- or he starts producing albums for other, hipper people, preferably young women -- all that's left for TTD is a Behind the Music and a box set. And one final thought: Lauryn Hill, pay very close attention to how this man's career has played out. Consider yourself warned. (JOE GROSS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide