Hi, everyone. Needthony Shavetano, here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Daniel Caesar album, Son of Spergy.

Here we have the newest album from singer, songwriter, producer, Mr. Daniel Caesar. His fourth, in fact, and latest for Republic Records, a label he has been on for a minute now. And going into this, I wasn't really sure what to expect if I really had anything to truly hope for. Because ever since making waves with his full-length debut in 2017, I feel like Daniel hasn't really offered much more than just potential. Potential that fails to be fully capitalized on with each following album, even as his song lengths and feature lists were getting more ambitious on his previous record, Never Enough, back in 2023 — a record that just hasn't really stuck with me at all since I initially covered it, certainly not in the same way tracks like "Best Part" have from his first album.

Going into Spergy though, I guess I was just hoping for something with a bit more weight and memorability. What's for sure is that there definitely has been more personal narrative building in the lead up to this record as Daniel is now 30 years old, and I guess he spends a lot of time on this record reflecting on his formerly hedonistic life, analyzing his attraction to sin as he reconnects with God, reconnects with family members who he didn't always see eye-to-eye with as well.

In that regard, he is also realizing on this record just how much he has in common with his father, gospel singer Norwill Simmonds, who was also featured on the fourth track of this record. He also muses about love on this record, too, with respect to potentially becoming a father himself sometime soon. There is a lot going on thematically and personally for sure with this record. I mean, you could even bill it as maybe Daniel's most mature and contemplative project yet.

But with all that being said, I still came away from Spergy feeling quite disillusioned. Consistently on these tracks, I was more impressed by what the music and the ideas were alluding to and gesturing toward, versus what it actually delivered, as the opening track is this beautiful, gospel-tinged tone-setter with pretty layers of pianos and vocals at its peak. But it's just a loose motif of different instrumental fragments and doesn't really culminate into anything all that strong or memorable, even with Sampha in the mix. Even the first full song on the record following this, "Have a Baby (With Me)" — because I guess you should specify — this track lacks color and punch, too, as it comes across a very stale and icy take on bedroom pop and R&B, à la Frank Ocean. Meanwhile, "Call on Me" has about the potency level of a watered-down D'Angelo demo.

For sure in the first leg of this record, I think the instrumentation and the inspirations, the chord progressions, as well as the personal experiences to fuel the writing. They're all there. But Daniel continues to lack the chops and musical ideas to actually build upon what inspires his music boldly or put an interesting spin on it at the very least. I have to stress just how consistently drab the production on this project is.

Take "Moon" with Bon Iver, for example, which I think there's something here, but every element of this song — every piece of instrumentation, every melody — is just so faint, loose, and ill defined to leave much of an impression. I should say bluntly, just because something is quiet doesn't mean it's pretty. The way the instrumentation sounds on this track, and also on "No More Loving"... These instrumental palettes don't sound enveloping, or textured, or interesting. It's not pretty; it's just quiet. I think Daniel wants us to think it's pretty by virtue of playing quietly, but pretty and beautiful instrumentation and quiet instrumentation are not the same thing, not exclusively.

As far as the songwriting goes, the only tune I really felt was a stunner in the first half had to be "Who Knows", which is a super unsure love ballad with a lot of thoughtful bars about indecision that are packed with genuine anxiety and worry. The song itself, lyrically and melodically, is so catchy that it doesn't really need that extra oomf for it to really stick. The songwriting on "Root of All Evil" comes close as well, but the track ultimately is held back a little bit by Daniel not really having quite as much to say about his relationship with evil and temptation, outside of mostly accepting that it's just a part of him.

But later on the record, though, with "Touching God": wow! An actually passionate, hard-hitting vocal performance that has conviction and stands out in the mix with lyrics about self-loathing and Daniel's relationship with God. It's actually a super attention-grabbing moment on the album, but why does the song trail off immediately after this and go basically nowhere? Surely such a powerful moment could have been built upon in some way.

"The Sign of the Times" was another highlight to my ears. It's a track that marries both love and spirituality, with Daniel not only reflecting in part about being a dad potentially, his own mortality, and knowing when God is speaking to you through signs and showing you your paths in life through people, or events and occurrences. Again, super strong song on this album and an important moment thematically in the grander scheme of this record's storytelling narrative, too. But the final moments on the album beyond this reach a pretty mild and uneventful conclusion, leaving this album feeling way more underwhelming than it should have been.

Ultimately, I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who will be convinced by the gentle nature of the instrumentation on this record and feel how it's presenting just enough to make it a beautiful moment — one that is reinforced by a lot of the record's themes around sin, God, love, and family. But unfortunately, Spergy didn't really hit all that hard for me for many reasons. Much of the songwriting is bland and lacks structure or anything all that gripping about it.

Also, while the lyrics make the major themes of the record pretty clear, only some of them (not all) are explored with any real depth. Once again, the production and instrumentation on this record are pretty consistently boring and stiff, with only several genuinely lush sounding cuts across the tracklist.

On top of all of that, I was genuinely surprised to hear, in my experience with the album, that its pretty impressive feature list wasn't really much of a factor in how impressive or interesting it was. Given some of the names here, I expected at least a few show-stopping appearances, but I didn't really get any, which is why I'm feeling a light 5 on this album. It's okay. It's listenable.

Anthony Fantano. Daniel Caesar. Forever.