The soul singer looks backward on his fourth album, a wistful nostalgia trip that wraps its '70s-inspired sound in sumptuous, heavily stylized production.
Yesteryear has always been a balm for Leon Bridges, the neo-soul singer who first became known for the deliberate revival of pre-Motown R&B on his 2015 debut, Coming Home. With each successive record, Bridges crept further into the modern era, yet his fourth album, Leon, floats in a different plane: It's a nostalgia trip that disguises its sentimentality beneath its heavily stylized, ultra-polished exterior.
Where Bridges previously framed his cribbing from the past as a signifier of authenticity, all the borrowed sounds on Leon are consciously blurry, playing on collective memories of communal good times. When woven together, the enveloping reverb, reassuring rhythms, and tuneful yearning amount to a well-worn scrapbook for Bridges, a vehicle that allows him to reminisce at a comfortable repose. As he puts it on one of the album's pivotal tracks, he's in a "Peaceful Place," enjoying the sweet stillness of a bright, sunny vista.
Leon sustains this blissful attitude throughout the album's succinct 43 minutes. Bridges created its gentle sway in tandem with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, a pair of producers who have served as Kacey Musgraves' chief collaborators since Golden Hour, the 2018 album that earned the country singer the Grammy for Album of the Year. Golden Hour is a blueprint for Leon, particularly in the way refurbished vintage sounds serve as stylish accents on modern pop. Musgraves' blurring of genres and eras was deliberately amorphous, resulting in music that could seamlessly slide onto pop and country playlists. Bridges attempts a similar trick on Leon. Avoiding anything conspicuously contemporary, he nevertheless winds up with an album that sounds quintessentially modern in that it could be parceled out into any number of settings; it would sound equally at home on playlists designed for morning coffee or late-night chillouts.
Bridges pulls from numerous sources, touching upon introspective folk and pulsating pop alike. What unites the album is a pervasive rose-tinted nostalgia that's undergirded by his unending gratitude. Early in the record, he provides a laundry list of affections on "That's What I Love," setting a soothing tone that's never once broken. He does pepper the record with hints of unpleasantness -- underneath its sunny pulse, "Panther City" contains a suggestion of the trouble lurking in the neighborhoods surrounding his childhood home -- but his sweet, rounded tone and the softly sculpted settings all lend the impression that he's left the darkness behind. There's no grit here, no earthiness: It's a fantasy constructed out of pleasant recollections and dusty old records.
Fantasy can be appealing, of course, especially when it's conjured with the loving care that Bridges, Fitchuk, and Tashian bring to Leon. Relying heavily on the sun-bleached soul of the early 1970s, the trio paints with acoustic strums, subdued funk, fuzz guitar, glistening keyboards, and, in the case of "Laredo," jazz flute. None of the songs on Leon sound precisely alike -- the sensual slow burn of "Ain't Got Nothin' on You" gives way to the longing piano ballad "Simplify," and the pastoral pleas of "Ivy" slide into the sensuous "Ghetto Honeybee" -- but for all its variety, Leon is oddly monochromatic, even a touch insular. Blame it on studio craft so slick that it refuses to let any grit into the proceedings; the arrangements are airless, never allowing space for dissonance or accidents. The tidiness of the production makes Leon feel curiously frictionless. All the emotions Bridges mines in looking back are flattened into another textural element in the mix, a move that results in an album as comforting as a cool summer breeze -- and just as ephemeral.