![]() (His funked-out 2011 cover of Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me” was a hint that he was ready to travel even further down the unbeaten path suggested by early hits like the loping “All I Want Is You” and the woozy “Quickie.”) But this album is no loose collection of semi-formed songs and bad-trip memories - Miguel has impeccable songwriting chops and a deceptively supple voice, not to mention total command of both.Īnd so the stormily minimalist “Don’t Look Back” has booming drums and an inherent by-the-throat urgency that dissolves into Miguel’s cough-syrup take on the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” (an adventurous rock-radio programmer would do well to slot it between, say, tracks from AWOLNATION and fun., since it possesses the bombast of the former and vocal-gymnastic prowess of the latter). Reverb abounds, and Miguel is more than ready to fuck with popular music’s current structures - how a song should travel its three-and-a-half-minute path, whether or not he should stay in his genre-appointed lane. Much of Kaleidoscope Dream sounds, as the title might suggest, fractal. And Miguel’s vocal bravado certainly enhances the song’s seductive properties: He lets loose on the coda, bursting out with a delighted ululation that’s either an all-in attempt to seal the deal with his desired, or an expression of delight that said consent has already been given. “Adorn,” the erotically charged opening track, first single, and (yes!) radio hit, kicks us off, flaunting a sizable debt to Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” Yet its details - like the off-kilter vocal echoes and buried-in-the-mix synth bursts - ground it firmly in the present day. But even with those sneak peeks, the full Kaleidoscope Dream is startling and invigorating, a fully formed statement from an artist hungrily surging toward the front of pop music’s creative pack. During the run-up to his second full-length, R&B polymath Miguel pre-released many of its songs piecemeal, through both his free online EP series Art Dealer Chic, and his label’s pair of “official” three-song teasers (subtitled The Water Series and The Air Series).
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