Daniel Caesar Continues to be more than we all Deserve with Third Studio Album, ‘NEVER ENOUGH’
Evan Dale // April 7, 2023
It’s a good day to be a fan of R&B, of Neo-Soul, of music at large, when Toronto love child, Daniel Caesar releases an album. And if a Daniel Caesar album is indeed the mark of a good day, even if the downtrodden end of his croonings often soundtrack the gloomy ones, there have only ever been three others. His debut, Pilgrim’s Paradise, introduced us all in 2015 to his unparalleled vocal highs and particularly emotionally evocative knack for weaving the authentic struggles of relationships into his songwriting. Two years later, in 2017, Freudian - which in this journalist’s humble opinion, is a pillared masterpiece of the existing R&B renaissance, and frankly, of all time - compounded his one-of-a-kind sound into a thematically fluid, emotionally unequaled delve into the ups and downs of love, lust, and loss. 2019 brought with it the most experimentally nuanced take on his own sound, aptly named CASE STUDY 01, where productive risks were swung on, and never missed; where he invited an exceptionally broad list of featuring friends to procure his experimentalism; and where, given it all, his range grew even wider. But finally, after his longest hiatus to date, what does 2023 have in stow?
NEVER ENOUGH. Caesar has always been a little self loathing, for no good reason from a musical standpoint, but seemingly heartbroken just enough in perpetuity to instill in his listeners some sort of endless emotional provocation. And as always, with the balance between his exceedingly unique contributions to the musical spaces he inhabits and the passionate tumult all of them convey, he strikes auditory gold.
NEVER ENOUGH’s run-up of singles, all dipped in blue like the eventual project itself, provided a glimpse into the direction he’d ultimately dig with the wider scope of the album. Do You Like Me? bleeds with a mellow alt rock tinge of instrumental cool, where acoustic guitars and an analogue band remind listeners of just the kind of unabashed youth that Caesar explores deeper with cascading poeticism on the insecurities and triumph of a romantic adolescent. It’s a consistent element of the project throughout. Let Me Go, birthed from drowning organ chords, sees his unencumbered, unedited, stretched vocal cords begging for the lonely existence he so often seems to strive for. that raw delivery is omnipresent here, too. Valentina, built atop a series of underwater synth strokes and a storm of lustful quests for adultery, beams as NEVER ENOUGH’s quintessential babymaker - a space where Caesar has always, and will always, be a welcomed curator of our most animalistic emotional waves. Pull Take Me Away (2017), Who Hurt You? (2018), Beauty & Essex (2018), and RESTORE THE FEELING (2019) into a nightcap playlist with Valentina, and it’ll outlast any of y’all. That’s a guarantee.
Lastly, Unstoppable, now NEVER ENOUGH’s closing act, sees Caesar guiding those lustful thematics towards his most stable diatribe on love to date. It’s honest, authentic, and yet still steeped in the mellow beats and outright emotional immersion that defines the album — and his career — at length. It’s the emotional intelligence and thematic maturity here that perhaps play the leading singles’ biggest role in defining the album itself.
It’s a formula mastered, broken down, and reconstructed again and again, song by song, each congruent yet varied emotionally and sonically, building towards a larger tale of subtle reminiscence in order to make sense of the future. And that future, one seemingly often in flux for the romantically-inclined Caesar whose exploits in the arena are so well-documented and so often dotted with land mines, hinges on something more emotionally grounded, calm, and secure than his prior works. NEVER ENOUGH - contrary to its title - is much more the story of his love, life, and lust’s success in coming together harmoniously, than have been many of the other singles and albums he’s released to date, where his romantic life just never seemed to work out. Maybe, after all of this, Daniel has found lasting love. And in that way, it feels a lot like Freudian where the hopefulness of Get You and Best Part left him less jaded than many of the other versions of himself.
Musically, it edges closer towards Freudian too, albeit in a way more in line with Daniel's life these days. The album is beamed through the auditory projection of a studio band - a guitar, a bass, some keys and drums, and sometimes strings - all coming together around the central idea that maybe a voice as generational as Daniel’s shines brightest amongst other electronically absent instrumentation. There’s something so organically intriguing about the imperfection in what is mostly a perfect register, that it should be celebrated. And through the entirety if NEVER ENOUGH, very much akin to the aesthetic of his rare live performances, it is.
Toronto 2014 is a key look into just that reminiscence, and not just because of its title. Almost folksy in opening by way of its gentle guitar chords, the track quickly leads into an exhibition of Caesar’s unparalleled highs intermixing with a soothing, choral hook. Compositional and vast, it could have easily slipped into Freudian’s track list.
Another moment of particular interest — even of the entirety of NEVER ENOUGH is worth a listen, in order, all the way through — is the Omar Apollo assisted Buyer’s Remorse, which feels altogether detached from any musical spectrum known to the modern scene that can be delineated without listing at least one, if not both, of the artists involved. Teetering on theatrical in its compositional througline, Buyer’s Remorse is propelled forward by a series of phase shifts, accompanied by meandering displays of Daniel Caesar and Omar Apollo’s range.
It’s been a tender, long four years since last we got an album from Daniel Caesar. But an album — a good day — is not something that can be expected or asked for. And that’s why they’re so much sweeter when they do come around. And for Daniel Caesar, with NEVER ENOUGH, a continued evolution of the same sound that has always made him one of the most talented, evocative, staple names in not only R&B, not only Neo-Soul, but across all of music, makes this album — like his prior three projects — a masterful delivery well wroth the wait that will soundtrack the gloomy days, the lustful evenings, and all of the emotion-soaked spaces in between for years to come, until another project blesses us in time.