A heretic streak quietly coursed through Daniel Caesar’s early work. “If I should die before I wake/Thank God I left this pseudo place/All I love and all I am/Is not in sync with God’s great plan,” he sang on Praise Break. Although his searching music openly drew from the gospel he heard growing up in an Adventist household, a distrust lurked. His second EP opened with ambient sounds from the Toronto neighborhood he landed in after clashing with his family and leaving home to pursue music. “Lay in your bed, reap what you sow/Welcome to your paradise,” he sang, both celebrating and doubting his decision.
By Freudian, Caesar’s 2017 breakthrough, gospel had become more an accent in his music than a friction, magnifying his aching tales of young romance. He settled firmly into R&B on subsequent releases, documenting hook-ups, heartbreak, and nouveau-riche excess over guitar-driven arrangements flecked with touches of psych rock. On Son of Spergy, his fourth album, Caesar aims to reconcile his spirit and his flesh with songs of devotion that fuse gospel, R&B, and folk, but the songwriting lacks the depth to develop these weighty themes.
The title refers to the nickname of Caesar’s father, singer and pastor Norwill Simmonds. Caesar once cast him as an antagonist, singing, “Picking fights with my pops/He asked forgiveness a lot/But I don’t need God’s forgiveness.” That rebellious sentiment hasn’t played an explicit role in most of his music, but he’s intent to rebuke it here, casting his earthly and heavenly fathers as pillars of his life. To that end, he opens the record with a gorgeous gospel arrangement that threads his voice with Sampha and Tiana Kruškić into a seraphic choir. “Lord let your blessings rain down,” Caesar pleads. It feels like a reclamation.
But the music that follows is directionless. Caesar sings often of wanting to become a father, but the theme is muddled by his clumsy writing. “What if we married, what if you believed/In God, this world, and hell, and all the things that this could be,” he says on the imploring “Have a Baby (With Me),” one of four songs co-written with Mustafa. Like Jagged Edge on their classic (and kind of boneheaded) “Let’s Get Married,” Caesar seems to want to channel desperation, his heart outpacing his mind as he says whatever will keep his lover in his life. But no, he’s quite serious. “It’s too late for our dreams/We can make a new dream/Have a baby with me,” he sings, a sequence of words so unsexy it could be a contraceptive.
“Sign of the Times,” a track about gleaning divine messages from the mundane, gets just as uncomfortable. When Caesar kisses a woman, he has a vision of her “bringing forth life/Like Madonna and her child,” a line I imagine wouldn’t fly even on Christian Mingle. In a rap verse on the same song, he goes on to say turning 30 prompted this desire for a family, a rather basic explanation for all his existentialism. Caesar writes almost entirely in abstractions: The relationships he sings of are rarely worthy experiences in themselves. He insists that there be some greater purpose, some divine plan directing the movement of stars and loins.
Occasionally, he gets out of his own way. “Baby Blue,” a slow-burning R&B number, is a cocoon of tenderness. Crooning over strings, soft drums, and guitar, Caesar swoons over and over. When he’s in this mode, his timbre and cadence evoke those of doo-wop singers, all innocence and youth and dewy-eyed hope. But then Caesar decides to end the song with an impassioned coda from Simmonds about Jesus’ love transcending all others. Simmonds has a glorious voice, but the add-on overwrites the romance at the center of the song.
These religious flourishes might feel less disruptive if Caesar rooted them in a narrative, or homed in on his prior and current relationships to spirituality the way Mustafa, who’s also an executive producer, does on Dunya. But he’s got more platitudes than testimonies. “Root of All Evil” evokes vague temptations, relying on words like “sinner” and “evil” to suggest tribulation. Twinkly single “Moon,” one of two Bon Iver collabs, gestures at discontent with weak metaphors about fighters who “keep fighting.” “Who’s gonna fight for me? Who will advocate?/Who’s gonna be my Jesus?” Caesar asks emptily. The doubt is bloodless; his bemused tone makes him sound more stoned than anguished.
It’s a shame to hear such exquisite arrangements go to waste. Caesar and regular collaborators Jordan Evans (Drake, Eminem), Matthew Burnett (Keri Hilson, Lil Wayne), and Dylan Wiggins (Solange, Kali Uchis) produce most of the songs, and they all know how to let things breathe. They take an almost chamber-pop approach to production, using instruments and voices for texture as much rhythm and melody. The songs build patiently, the production and background vocals burbling beneath Caesar’s singing like a brook. “Touching God,” a standout, features a murmured Blood Orange verse that’s hushed as prayer and builds to an impassioned gospel outro from Yebba that erupts like an epiphany. Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony.
But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting. Caesar’s got nothing to say about himself, his family, or his savior that isn’t on a greeting card. And he shows no interest in the melodrama that can elevate R&B songs about love and its complications into the sublime, the singular. Whatever story he aims to tell about faith, it’s not in the music.
