Album reviews: Daniel Caesar – Case Study 01, and The Soft Cavalry – The Soft Cavalry

Daniel Caesar – Case Study 01

★★★☆☆

Daniel Caesar’s album Case Study 01 arrived with little in the way of fanfare. In fact, the Canadian crooner’s second record was only announced on Wednesday – strange given that his 2017 debut, the Grammy-nominated Freudian, was met with such critical acclaim. With its gospel influences and breezy acoustic guitars, the album stood out in an era of hedonistic, synth-driven R&B pioneered by his Toronto peers, Drake and The Weeknd.

In the year building up to this release, Caesar has suffered a number controversies. There was an awkward exchange with a stoned Dave Chappelle over Instagram Live on John Mayer’s Current Mood show, where the comedian called him “very gay”. Then Caesar was criticised for defending the hugely problematic “influencer” Julieanna “YesJulz” Goddard, and later caused a backlash with comments claiming black people were being “too sensitive” about racial issues.

Whether it’s a consequence or coincidence, Case Study 01 is fractured and disillusioned; it opens with a number of sultry jams (significantly sexed-up since Freudian) then flips into weird territory by “Superposition”, which features Mayer on guitar and has Caesar spouting vague musings: “This music s**t’s a piece of cake,” he sings, “The rest of my life’s in a state of chaos/ But I know I’ll be OK.”

Where Freudian had a self-assuredness that felt rare for an artist so fresh into his career, Case Study 01 sounds like a work by someone desperately trying to reinvent himself as a ladies’ man. At best, songs “Cyanide”, with its rather sinister line “I am not a monster/ I’m just a man with needs”, and “Open Up” – about having sex on a piano – are unconvincing. At worst, they are problematic. The instrumentation, too, is a confusing jumble of acoustic guitar picks, stuttering hi-hats, vocoder distortion and gospel choruses – even features by Brandy (”Love Again”) and Pharrell (”Frontal Lobe Muzik”) can’t save it.

“I hated myself, when I was a boy,” Daniel Caesar sings on the opening track, “Entropy”. “Now that I don’t, they’re trying to take my joy.” Of course, as a listener you want the artist to sound comfortable in their own skin. But by the end of Case Study 01, it’s hard to be convinced that this is really him. Roisin O’Connor

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The Soft Cavalry – The Soft Cavalry

★★★★☆

To say that The Soft Cavalry are a husband-and-wife team is to suggest their debut album is a loved-up, blissful affair. It is, yes. But this project between musician Steve Clarke and shoegaze-band Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell is far too considered to be cloying or sentimental: its layered sonics are complex and captivating.

Finding love at any time, especially in your late thirties, can be full of complications, and for Clarke those complications included the hangover of a divorce a few years earlier, and a Christian upbringing with which to grapple.

For years, Clarke remained in the shadows of the music industry as a bassist and backing singer – in guitar band Dumdums and as a session musician for David Brent: Life on the Road. It was through meeting Goswell in 2014, when he became Slowdive’s tour manager, that he discovered an outlet for his own songwriting.

Goswell’s ethereal vocals add dream-pop haze to already-atmospheric songs. With her voice centre stage, the slow-paced “Passerby” – set to piano and twinkling, circling harpsichord – becomes the album’s most glacially cinematic.

Clarke’s doubts in faith inspired the reverb-heavy introspection of “Velvet Fog”, and the equally-brooding “The Ever-Turning Wheel” – the album’s epic apex, which builds emotive intensity with swelling strings and brass. These are detailed, stained-glass windows into Clarke’s personal musings. “Never Be Without You” has a welcome, Cure-like lightness of melody, with soft, bouncy synths, while the bucolic feel of the couple’s Devon surroundings is captured in the mellow flute of “Only in Dreams”. A slow-burning triumph. Elisa Bray