Much has changed in the five years since Michael Kiwanuka last released a record. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and a string of prime ministers passing through his native UK, Kiwanuka has faced tectonic shifts in his personal life. After recording the Mercury prize-winning Kiwanuka in 2019, the singer finally left London, where he was born and had lived for decades. He also became a father of two, an experience that forced him to develop a steadier hand. “You haven’t got loads of time, so you have to make decisions,” Kiwanuka recently told The Guardian. “You have to know who you are.”
That sense of equanimity, of calmness in the face of constant flux, lies at the heart of Small Changes, co-produced by Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) and Inflo. The record’s vision of psychedelic soul is comparatively spare, almost dainty, beside the sweeping string arrangements and epic gospel harmonies of Love & Hate and Kiwanuka. It’s a mellower, more assured album; Kiwanuka seems less interested in topping the charts than in creating a refuge from the noise of modern life, a fixed point around which everything else can continue to spin. Equipped with a more stripped-down palette, he sounds for the first time like a man floating above the world rather than one attempting to struggle through it.
The atmosphere is certainly thinner up here. “Floating Parade,” the name of the opening track, could work just as well as a subtitle for the record at large. The songs drift by like so many balloons in a dreamlike procession, buoyed by soft synths and tumbling drums. Spectral background vocals shadow Kiwanuka’s warm baritone through the ether. There’s a koan-like simplicity to the lyrical fragments he breathes like incantations over the album’s spacey arrangements. “Do small changes/Ever last now/Or bemoan in my head?” Kiwanuka sings on the title track.
In this placid, downtempo mode, Kiwanuka freely indulges his nostalgia for the sentimentality of ’60s and ’70s soul. A string of unabashedly saccharine love songs forms the record’s backbone. As suggested by titles like “One and Only” and “The Rest of Me,” they trade in starry-eyed schmaltz informed by a youth spent worshiping Bill Withers and Otis Redding; they’re full of Hallmark-ready lines like “Young hearts burning/Wherever they take us to/Oh darling, I’m always with you.” But even though the lines may be cliché, Kiwanuka knows how to sell them. Underneath the mawkishness, there’s the wised-up sincerity of someone who no longer cares about sounding cool.
Kiwanuka likewise seems uninterested in forcing anything too spectacular to happen on any of these tunes, as if he looked around at the piles of accolades that followed his last few albums and decided not to risk pulling a muscle. Most songs remain at a simmer. The closest he comes to swinging for the bleachers is with the two-part centerpiece “Lowdown,” which imagines a forlorn Kiwanuka sleepwalking through an alien cityscape, gawked at by locals, ending with an extended instrumental reminiscent of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”
It sometimes feels like there’s something missing from Small Changes. There are few of the bravura solos or transfixing hooks that animated much of Kiwanuka’s recent work. There’s certainly nothing like “Cold Little Heart,” the breathtakingly catchy hit that got snatched up by HBO for Big Little Lies soundtrack fodder and drove Love & Hate to the top of the UK charts. But Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that’s part of the pleasure of Small Changes. It’s a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he’s made.
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