Yesteryear has all the time been a balm for Leon Bridges, the neo-soul singer who first grew to become identified for the deliberate revival of pre-Motown R&B on his 2015 debut, Coming House. With every successive report, Bridges crept additional into the fashionable period, but his fourth album, Leon, floats in a unique aircraft: It’s a nostalgia journey that disguises its sentimentality beneath its closely stylized, ultra-polished exterior.
The place Bridges beforehand framed his cribbing from the previous as a signifier of authenticity, all of the borrowed sounds on Leon are consciously blurry, enjoying on collective reminiscences of communal good instances. When woven collectively, the enveloping reverb, reassuring rhythms, and tuneful craving quantity to a well-worn scrapbook for Bridges, a car that permits him to reminisce at a snug repose. As he places it on one of many album’s pivotal tracks, he’s in a “Peaceable Place,” having fun with the candy stillness of a shiny, sunny vista.
Leon sustains this blissful perspective all through the album’s succinct 43 minutes. Bridges created its mild sway in tandem with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, a pair of producers who’ve served as Kacey Musgraves’ chief collaborators since Golden Hour, the 2018 album that earned the nation singer the Grammy for Album of the Yr. Golden Hour is a blueprint for Leon, significantly in the best way refurbished classic sounds function fashionable accents on trendy pop. Musgraves’ blurring of genres and eras was intentionally amorphous, leading to music that would seamlessly slide onto pop and nation playlists. Bridges makes an attempt an identical trick on Leon. Avoiding something conspicuously up to date, he nonetheless winds up with an album that sounds quintessentially trendy in that it may very well be parceled out into any variety of settings; it might sound equally at residence on playlists designed for morning espresso or late-night chillouts.
Bridges pulls from quite a few sources, touching upon introspective folks and pulsating pop alike. What unites the album is a pervasive rose-tinted nostalgia that’s undergirded by his endless gratitude. Early within the report, he supplies a laundry record of affections on “That’s What I Love,” setting a soothing tone that’s by no means as soon as damaged. He does pepper the report with hints of unpleasantness—beneath its sunny pulse, “Panther Metropolis” incorporates a suggestion of the difficulty lurking within the neighborhoods surrounding his childhood residence—however his candy, rounded tone and the softly sculpted settings all lend the impression that he’s left the darkness behind. There’s no grit right here, no earthiness: It’s a fantasy constructed out of nice recollections and dusty outdated data.
Fantasy may be interesting, after all, particularly when it’s conjured with the loving care that Bridges, Fitchuk, and Tashian carry to Leon. Relying closely on the sun-bleached soul of the early Seventies, the trio paints with acoustic strums, subdued funk, fuzz guitar, glistening keyboards, and, within the case of “Laredo,” jazz flute. Not one of the songs on Leon sound exactly alike—the sensual sluggish burn of “Ain’t Obtained Nothin’ on You” provides strategy to the longing piano ballad “Simplify,” and the pastoral pleas of “Ivy” slide into the sensuous “Ghetto Honeybee”—however for all its selection, Leon is oddly monochromatic, even a contact insular. Blame it on studio craft so slick that it refuses to let any grit into the proceedings; the preparations are airless, by no means permitting house for dissonance or accidents. The tidiness of the manufacturing makes Leon really feel curiously frictionless. All of the feelings Bridges mines in trying again are flattened into one other textural aspect within the combine, a transfer that leads to an album as comforting as a cool summer time breeze—and simply as ephemeral.
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