This is unabashed nostalgia in its most unadulterated form, and despite our misgivings about throwing around the oft-abused word, "vintage”, that's probably the only term that truly describes the spirit of this album. Not since Raphael Saadiq’s Stone Rollin in 2011 have we seen such a brazen effort to resurrect a sound that has long since been watered down in other circles by decades of interbreeding with other genres. Leon Bridges’ Coming Home does just that, however, and it executes with extreme finesse. Leon’s particular brand of soul and gospel is far from revolutionary, so unless he innovates in the future, he’ll always live in the shadow of predecessors like Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls, and Otis Redding. That being said, when you strip away the chronology and just evaluate Coming Home on its own merit, there’s really no reason why Leon shouldn’t be taken just as seriously as any of the greats. In short, this album feels like the long awaited epilogue to that crop of legendary soul music in the '60s which helped make modern pop and R&B what it is today. The album itself is chock-full of hits, and while the album’s title track, “Coming Home”, is still a big standout, the rest of the tracklist carries its momentum forward with ease. Songs like “Better Man”, “Brown Skin Girl”, and “Smooth Sailin’” all offer more of that same effortless listening experience, and while the recording techniques use none of that wall-shaking bass that we’ve become accustomed to in most of our pop songs, Leon’s songwriting still brings plenty of energy to the mix. From there, Leon shifts down a couple of gears, and both “Shine” and “Lisa Sawyer” are specimens of a more thoughtful breed of music. They’re very quiet, and the pace is slow, but they’re not relaxed. This words evoke a sincerity and earnestness that sync perfectly with the tunes, and when all of the moving parts are bolted together, pure magic is what we receive. By the end of the album, the pace has picked back up some, but the carefree attitude that you’ll enjoy at the beginning has been tempered with a deeper sense of purpose, and this transition is where Coming Home goes from good to great. It would be inaccurate to herald Leon's album here as some sort of revelation in contemporary music, because, bluntly put, there’s nothing really new that he's bringing to the table. However, it would also be a huge mistake to write off Leon’s work as some sort of hack attempt to emulate the success of past greats. When you break down this album into its smallest divisible parts and remove any historical context, what you get is a masterpiece of a project that would have been just as welcome in your grandparent’s record collection 50 years ago as it is in your Spotify playlist today, and that by itself is reason enough to acknowledge the artist as one of the best things to happen to music in a long, long time. Coming Home is available on iTunes now, or stream all of it Spotify.
Leon Bridges