Even as he came into his own as a soul singer, Jamie Lidell never seemed ready to completely let go of his identity as a laptop experimentalist. At times over the last decade Lidell has seemed torn over the kind of artist he’s wanted to be, a prestige IDM producer or a mass-appeal blue-eyed soul act, and on recent albums those two visions have seemed increasingly irreconcilable. Rather than building a reputation as a shapeshifter in the vein of his sometime-collaborator Beck, he began to come across as just kind of erratic—especially on the misguided, Morris Day-by-way-of-Squarepusher fusion of his 2013 self-titled effort, a peanut butter-and-olive-sandwich of a record that tried to play to both of his skillsets but flattered neither. On Building A Beginning, though, Lidell stops trying to have it both ways, unplugging his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career.
The album’s title could refer to a number of fresh starts. It’s Lidell’s first since splitting from Warp Records, the label he’s called home since his solo debut and whose cache gave him cover to crossover without alienating his old electronic audience, and it’s filled with ruminations on his rekindled romance with his wife (who co-wrote the album’s lyrics) and, even more significantly, the birth of his first son. The album’s most direct tribute to his newborn, “Julian” is one of the most unabashedly jubilant songs he’s ever written, equal parts Jackson 5 and Maroon 5. “There’s no way to un-see the harshest things I’ve ever seen, but now you’re here and life’s a dream,” Lidell sings like a man born again. “Now my life’s worth living.”
So Lidell’s in a good place these days, and he spends the album in awe of his good fortune, high off of familial bliss. Never shy about borrowing from Stevie Wonder, he pens his own “I Was Made to Love Her” for his son with “I Live to Make You Smile.” Elsewhere he looks to other soul greats. The title track swoons with the weightless grace of Al Green’s heyday records, introducing the distinctly Hi Records-esque backup singers who support him throughout the record, while “Find It Hard to Say” looks to the afterhours quiet storm of Smokey Robinson. There are flashes of more modern R&B, too. “Don’t Let Me Let You Go” lifts the blissed-out piano plinks of the-Dream’s early singles, and the album highlight “Walk Right Back” offers a tighter, more tasteful take on the ’80s electro-R&B that came across so jumbled on Lidell’s self-titled record. That track is suave enough to be an Anthony Hamilton song, and really, Hamilton is probably the best possible model for Lidell when he's working in this lane, since nobody else is making records that span so many eras of soul quite so effortlessly.
But game as he is, Lidell isn’t nearly the singer Hamilton is, and his performances usually revert to the same two notes, either mawkish sentimentalism or overeager gleefulness. He attacks many of these songs with the unflappable cheer that other artists reserve for Target-exclusive Christmas albums, and while there’s some pleasure in satisfaction in Lidell’s joy, beyond that Beginning doesn’t offer many thrills. If this is his new beginning, it’s an unambitious one: Lidell has never sounded like more of a traditionalist than he does on this amiable but uncomplicated record.
