The Black Album was due later in the year, but this is the real darkness. Joe S. Harrington once wrote that the genius of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied was that the weakest song was slotted leadoff. In that case, give Prince the goddamn Nobel Prize for Musicology: “Come” is eleven minutes of Prince crashing one sexual ship after another onto a fine bass groove. His powers of seduction have deserted him. Not that his pillow talk was universally compelling, but it was invigorated by conviction. Here, we get an embarrassing reenactment of cunnilingus and two couplets that could be read as scatological (cf. “It’s no wonder there’s a puddle there/Holding it in 4 so long” and “U should get that shit started/U can change your underwear”.

On the whole, though, this is a fine record: tight-lipped and stark. The conversational register is employed heavily; tracks like the downtempo “Space” and the punishing funk number “Pheromone” get over on earworms. “Dark” is the purest soul slow burn he ever recorded, oozing that nightclub feel with some of his best male backing vocals. After dipping into veiled biography on Love Symbol’s “The Sacrifice Of Victor,” he drops the metaphor for “Papa,” a ghostly strut that talk-sings its anguish until the capper: “Don’t abuse children… or else they turn out like me.” The band strikes up a fearsome Parliament howl, but after what we just heard, the attempt at universality only hurts. The self-abnegating “Solo” is his slowest album cut yet, barely more than Prince and a judiciously portioned harp. It’s a combination of “Motherless Child” and Edith Piaf, a startling ride across the full range of his vocals.

This was Prince’s final Warner Bros. album under his birth name; weary of his label’s constantly pumping the brakes on his release schedule, pushed to the brink by its cancellation of a distribution deal with Paisley Park Records, he raided his vault for Come. (Ironically, Warner couldn’t resist pushing The Black Album out in limited release before the end of the year.) Prince being Prince, he couldn’t resist the lure of ambition, at one point considering a three-disc release. In the end, he chopped up an ocean-sounds-and-narration track and sowed it into the record (Closing cut “Orgasm” is the largest fragment.) He had his mind set on The Gold Experience, to the point of lobbying for a simultaneous release. But bank vaults land harder than all others, and despite his making his feelings clear with a funereal cover (Prince standing in front of ornate church gates, his dates of birth and “death” printed under his name), it was Come that was released, and Come that was savaged as yet another puzzling turn from pop’s onetime savior.