Miguel Latest Album3/22/2021
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Its escapism as a stand-in for freedom both spiritual and actual, a way to shake loose within ever-lusher soundscapes. ![]() Hes said as much, at least; in early November, he told Billboard that War Leisure is intentionally about the ethos right now, that we are right in the middle of all this. This would imply a more overtly political album than, say, 2015s sublime Wildheart, which made Congressional lobbying and the 42nd President into a slinky simile for a come-on, and parsed the feeling of being misplaced in a rigid society; or more political than Candles in the Sun, his 2012 call for peace and harmony. His allusions to the ethos right now are so far mostly visual, with the video for I Told You So featuring clips of Trump protests and earthly ills like nuclear missile launches and glacial melt, as he croons to baby about the freedom and pleasure in his love. In October, Miguel also debuted Now, War Leisure s most overt social-conscious joint, at a benefit for Schools Not Prisons, a California public education campaign). Instead of offering the more wokepolitical album hes been suggesting, this fraught moment has infused Miguel with a kinetic energy that is still mostly centered in his sacral chakra, a pelvic mind concern. Its juiced-up sex Miguel but with a fire in it, less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, a virile, wavy palette and a clear step forward in his maturation as a writer. Hes weaved an album thats taut and economical, like a featherweight champion landing smoothly choreographed jabs in the form of powerfully raspy harmonies and tight, lusty blues runs. Miguel has employed guns-as-sex-metaphors before, in 2010s My Piece and 2015s too-smoking-to-deal Coffee, which characterized cis hetero sex as gunplay a flip on the guitar-as-cock trope. On Banana Clip, a sneaky grin of a mid-tempo romance serenade, he asserts that hed do just about anything for his love, up to and including homicide: M-16 on my lapMissiles in the skyNo matter where I go on the mapYou got my protectionBanana clip on my love for youLet it ring like braapp. ![]() Over a chunky guitar riff and the requisite sex-reverb with a Tame Impala -style psych-harmony propping it all up, Miguel declares, I got a mind like ColumbineVigilante, Im volatile.I just want someone that I can trust, before the chorus: Its so good it feels criminalThis shits gotta be criminal. Even his more post-apocalyptic songs take an optimistic bent, like City of Angels, a pared-down blues croon about doing a woman wrong that also celebrates a deeper outcome. On the upbeat Caramelo Duro, assisted by Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, Miguel sings in Spanish about a sweet and freaky sucia hes trying to flow down, and while the espaol is fine, his hefty vocal depth places him in another distinct musical lineage, that of romantic Mexican crooners like Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernndez. Lets all will a Miguel Romeo Santos full-length collaboration into existence, too, if only because bachatas falsetto king could use his West Coast, low-end counterpoint. Its something that Miguel has always done, as an iconoclast in a musical landscape where genres are ever flattening and merging into each other. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and hes better than ever at just letting go.
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