Miguel - Wildheart, album review: 'soulful sincerity'

R&B singer conjures Prince, Ariel Pink, and Frank Ocean on his new odyssey
Soft-focus: Miguel's new material is evocative, if meaningless
Richard Godwin29 June 2015

★★★★☆
(Sony)

Now that the American zeitgeist has ghosted from New York to Los Angeles, here’s a soundscape that comes close to capturing modern La-La-Land in all its listless, sleazy languor. Miguel Jontel Pimentel’s last album, Kaleidoscope Dream, established the Mexican/Afro-American multi-instrumentalist as an adventurous new voice in R’n’B, his silken voice equally at home among filthy rock guitars and Parliament-esque psychedelia. Here, he has crafted a soft-focus odyssey through “sex, drugs and Polaroids.” He’s quite the romantic: “If I’m the blunt, you could be the light babe,” he croons on Sure Thing, but he also invests his more pornographic ambitions with the soulful sincerity of Prince: “Confess your sins to me while you masturbate,” he commands his lover on Valley. “I wanna f*** like we’re filming in the Valley”. The aftermath is no less Byronic, as Miguel wallows in the exquisite condo emptiness that Frank Ocean and (in his better moments) Ariel Pink conjure so well. It’s much more evocative than Snoop’s recent celebration of LA; it may be meaningless but as meaningless experiences go, it’s up there.

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