In love with rock’n’roll for the ways it allows him to indulge his considerable vocal prowess, Miguel Jontel Pimentel—at heart an R&B love man for whom pledges of devotion and kinky talk slip between each other like silk bedsheets between limbs—is the most interesting Black male singer to emerge from the post-Usher landscape. For a time, it seemed like Miguel competed against Trey Songz and Jeremih until his fascination with the studio put him way up front. On his fifth album, CAOS, Miguel’s first in eight years, listeners would not find him much changed from the imp whose 2010 single “Sure Thing” became an even bigger viral phenomenon two years ago; he could’ve slipped the new album’s “New Martyrs (Ride 4 U)” into his 2012 pop breakthrough Kaleidoscope Dream and “Angel’s Song” into 2015’s guitar-heavy Wildheart.
Eight years and not much of an overhaul. The effrontery, despite his promotional protestations, is admirable. If you didn’t get him the first or second time around, with slow-burn classic “Adorn” or the faintly sinister, Rick James-indebted six-string heroics of “Arch and Point,” then CAOS presents itself as a reacquaintance. It has moments when its brevity isn’t a show of wit so much as a dearth of compositional ideas. Fans will search in vain for an “Adorn” or even a “Sky Walker.” Yet sonically it’s a trip, and Miguel’s range as a singer remains undiminished.
The album begins with the overture of a title track, a co-production with Ray Brady garnished with a distorted sample of the MUSYCA Children’s Choir, the plucking of acoustic guitars, and Miguel’s okay Spanish love-me-downs. The same adventurousness animates “RIP,” a love song whose frantic drum track and woozy rhythm section undergird lyrics like “I rip when the weight bears down/Before I get edgy on my empty oscillations,” a tip of the hat to ’80s electro-R&B tracks by the likes of Ready for the World, whose curiosity about cybernetics sounded novel and fun. Miguel even recruits former computer gamer George Clinton, the Starchild himself, on closer “COMMA/KARMA,” a PG-rated update of “Coffee”—in 2025 it’s sushi and fresh sake and Miguel all like, “I’m proud to admit I’m kinda high right now.”
These tracks, along with the lissome “New Martyrs (Ride 4 U)” and the Dave Sitek co-production “Always Time,” constitute the heart of CAOS, as powerful as any of his previous music. But the middle stretch, starting with the Spanish-language “El Pleito,” drags some, especially the self-produced numbers, a couple of which barely crawl past the two-minute mark, and, boy, do they crawl. The album rights itself with “Nearsight [SID],” a spartan display of Miguel’s multi-tracked belting that reminds us what a thing of beauty his vocals are.
How CAOS will fare in this rubble of a musical landscape is worth the speculation. His colleagues have relied on their own tried-and-true. The Weeknd transformed from the solipsist of House of Balloons who baited musical traps for listeners into a sour romantic whose arena-rock gestures make his sniffles sound world-historic. Holding fast to his unofficial title as the Greta Garbo of aqueous R&B, Frank Ocean has burrowed into glistening midtempo electronic soundscapes, reinforcing an eternal culthood that fans like just fine. CAOS, title notwithstanding, is elegant and poised, and I hope it streams beyond Miquel’s claque.
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