John Legend - Bigger Love - synths, snogging and schmaltz

The Guardian 0

(Columbia)
After his sixth album’s foray into the complexity of relationships, the syrupy singer’s seventh reverts to saccharine crooning, in praise of his wife

With 2016’s Darkness and Light, John Legend seemed ready to address the thorny side of love. Shifting from the syrupy, wedding-ready love songs that have defined his career, he tackled romance as a force to be negotiated with. Yet the results of that reckoning are missing from his seventh album, Bigger Love. If anything, Legend’s brush with bleakness has caused an overcompensation of amatory devotionals.