In Revue- 'Wildheart' (Miguel)

It's not readily apparent what the most impressive thing is about Miguel's new LP Wildheart. The fact that he produced most of this fuzzy, yet smooth, blunt but sultry affair is laudable. It's not a common occurrence with R&B artists. So you almost want to award bonus points to Miguel for how cinematic he makes the guitar crunch sound in opener "A Beautiful Exit." Each chord recounts those pivotal scenes when a hero goes rushing headlong into the abyss. That's not Miguel's voice. It's distant and feathery, floating behind the static-painted wall. An ideal foil to such immediate heaviness.

Praise too is due to his sense of pacing. He's wise enough to place the sobering "What's Normal Anyway?" and "Hollywood Dreams" right next to each other. The former essentially focuses on the struggles of an African-American/Mexican-American man, who listens to John Lennon and Biggie, to find his peer group. "Too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans, too square to be a hood n****, what's normal anyway?" he painfully wonders aloud while strumming his guitar. In the latter we see the same man, still struggling, also forced to find a career in the cutthroat labyrinth of Los Angeles. Sex is a welcome salve, and a joyful distraction as we learn throughout the album, though it's tinged with regret in the Tame Impala meets Ginuwine number.

With that expert pacing we experience the carefree highs of love making in the thinly veiled "Waves," which brings to mind disco-era Marvin Gaye and has nothing to do with riding a surfboard. Then we crash a few songs later as Miguel wails over the sparse ripples and shaky percussion of "Leaves." Romance is a strange thing because the amount of time spent in it doesn't really matter. One night can matter as much as one decade depending on a person's perspective. So we have no idea how long Miguel and his female companion were around each other, there's only visceral singing to go off of.

Which is another element of Wildheart that should get a standing O, Miguel's singing. He doesn't quite have the piercing, Jacksonian falsetto of The Weeknd or Frank Ocean's supreme control, where he can cut off lines in an instant. His voice is often so affective because it drifts. A simple line like "I don't care," stands out in "...GoingtoHell." You're hanging with the thought to see where it goes and then it's gone in a haze of bass thumps and synth squiggles. There's no resolution, no pay off. "Coffee," the first single and closest comparison to the heavenly "Adore," continually promises ecstasy while focusing on the everyday. His voice is soft enough you'd think he's recording from under a bedsheet. And he never really throws it off. He threatens to once or twice with a wail but he goes right back to "tongue kissing and pillow talk." No need to ruin a good morning for the sake of a good ending. 

Others will give Miguel credit for his sly social consciousness. "We're gonna die young," might simply be a piecing of an overarching narrative about being in love and under 30, it could be about being black and getting killed before 30. The aforementioned "What's Normal Anyway?" is an ideal fit for a year where we can have intellectual discussions about race and gender identity. 

I'm not entirely sure how interested Miguel is in anything political though. Wildheart is an album about love. About the way it can make your heart race, your blood boil, your knees weak and your eyes water. We see how beautiful and ugly it can all be. Sex is shown in focus so we can see that femininity and masculinity don't matter, enjoyment does. And those two things are intertwined but not always. Love doesn't have to be eternal, impermanence is okay. If we applaud Miguel for doing anything, we should applaud him for teaching us that.

In Revue: 'Wild' (Miguel)

While it seems ostentatious that kaleidoscopic crooner Miguel would surprise release a new EP of progressively druggy R&B less than a week after D’Angelo damn near broke the music web with his masterful sneak attack Black Messiah, it makes sense in the right frame.

Miguel has a penchant for psych-soul/funk/R&B "ballads" that transmute at least three times before his voice floats away from them. If D'Angelo didn't outright invent the style on his 2000 record Voodoo, he helped popularize it. A song like "Playa Playa" can shift from narcotized tribal chanting to muted horns and not bat an eye. Without D'Angelo's work on that sophomore LP, we arguably don't get: the Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Solange or Miguel. Miguel's decision then has nothing to do with brazenness; it’s a tip of the cap to a sonic forefather.

Even if this new untitled EP (Wild to make it easier) was positioned as a contender to D'Angelo's hazy throne it would still rightly be viewed as a success. Miguel really rose to prominence with the Art Dealer Chic EPs in 2012 and the format suits him incredibly well. Each plea for a late night rendezvous is more desperate; every line of pillow talk tenderer because you know there's a finite amount of time. The Sun will be coming up soon and then it'll all be over.

But that's one facet of Miguel's inimitable style. He can do braggadocio with the best of his R&B peers and Wild's opening track "nwa" allows him to fully indulge. "She just wanna ride with an NWA," he hums over closely-mic'd drums, G-Funk synth wobbles and dust settling guitars. It's the sort of the line that's infinitely cooler because of how calm Miguel sounds delivering it. He's not pretending, he's a legit "NWA," and if you don't believe him you can ask legendary Philadelphia everyman Kurupt. The Dogg Pound member goes the Miguel route, barely rising above a gruff whisper, but he doesn't have the same effortlessness. He's the dude memorizing pickup lines while Miguel's breaking the ice with something he just thought up.

And if closer "coffee" is any indication, those lines clearly work. What starts as chat about "street-art and high-fashion," accompanied by blankets of static and murmuring bass, soon "devolves" into tongue kissing. Everything follows a natural path until Miguel and unnamed lover end with "coffee in the morning." "Coffee" has one of the cleverer hooks I've heard in 2014, if only because it finds a new way to portray a night of passion. It documents the kind of psychic connection that can form between two people who started off looking for the physical.

Miguel's true genius then is taking genre tropes and spinning them into audio gold. Like "Candles in the Sun" before it, "hollywooddreams" should sink under the weight of its own idealistic hokum, but it doesn't because of Miguel's commitment to the material. He's earnestly hoping for a "big break," trying to find a dream lost under surging guitars and twinkly synthesizers. There's no doubt he'll spot that break. With the artistic vision Miguel has, he could find anything.

"River"- Ibeyi

(From MaMA Paris)

 
Trying to differentiate yourself from your parents is no easy task. Odds are at some point in late childhood/early adulthood you're struck with a desire to do something they never did. If you grew up in a family of police officers, maybe you want to be a lawyer. Parents were doctors? Your job might be as far removed from the medical profession as possible. Seeking this kind of separation isn't necessarily a spiteful act, few people want to live their lives in the shadow of their parents and the best way to "escape" is to seek a distinctive profession. Even tougher than going your own way though is embracing the same occupation. Unless you figure out a way to differentiate yourself from your parents, you'll always be compared to them because of the job you've chosen.

That's the precarious position twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz of Ibeyi (ee-bey-ee) find themselves in. As the children of deceased Cuban percussionist/Buena Vista Social Club member Anga Díaz, the music the 19-year-olds create is influenced by their legendary conga playing father. At least on the surface. New track "River" from their Oya EP is marked by impeccably timed blasts of bass-heavy drum from XL Recordings head/producer Richard Russell. In a tribute to Cuba's rich but troubled multicultural past the twins spend the final moments of "River" singing in Yoruban, a West African language that arrived on Cuba's shores in the late 1700s. They're not completely their father's children though; Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi's vocal styles are more in line with modern indie R&B/soul than any "traditional" island sound. "My ego and my blame let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters," they breathlessly croon as background vocals moan and mechanical fingers snap in approval. "River" is proof the Díaz sisters can mine their father’s past without taking everything.

Ibeyi's Oya EP is now available for download on iTunes. Physical copies will drop later this summer.