But he’s also an adventurous enough soul to use those gifts for dizzy zoned-out meditations on sex and drugs - songs that give you an idea that this guy loves losing himself completely in those things, which is what those things are supposed to be for anyway. See, Miguel, like Frank Ocean before him, is an absolute professional: Someone who knows where to put the bridge, who knows the exact right moment to bust out his unearthly buttery falsetto. Those EPs were messy and inconsistent, but the languid drug-soul at their core showed a way forward for Miguel.

Around the same time Drake was releasing Take Care, his own excellently fleshed-out take on that sound, Miguel was starting to toss out his series of Art Dealer Chic EPs for free online. But then the whole hipster-soul wave of the Weeknd and Frank Ocean happened last year, and you could almost see the figurative lightbulb clicking on over Miguel’s head all the way on the other side of the country. His “ All I Want Is You” was a great single, but ask Jazmine Sullivan what a great single or two have done for her. But this week, there’s this absolutely glittering gem of a Miguel album, and I just can’t bring myself to listen to much of anything else.Ī few years ago, Miguel seemed like the sort of fabulously talented R&B singer who routinely gets lost in the major-label shuffle. In a slower week, I might’ve gone all-in, listened to Transcendental Youth day and night, attempted to piece together some rough idea of it so I could write this thing about it. In the beginning, I always get all caught up in second-guessing John Darnielle’s musical decisions, feeling slightly disconsolate about how far they move from previous albums (what the fuck dude, horns?), and it takes me a while to figure out why those work, how they support the words. And so Transcendental Youth, their new one, isn’t my favorite album of the week, though god knows it could be in a month or a year or a decade. Get Lonely only really started making sense to me, mattering to me, maybe last year, when that album was like five years old. It takes months, maybe years, for them to fully sink in and become a part of my headspace. The Mountain Goats are quite possibly my favorite band on the face of the earth, but their albums almost never reveal themselves to me right away. Before I get into this absolutely lovely new Miguel album, I’d like to say a quick word about the Mountain Goats.

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