Dijon Is R&B’s Past, Present, and Future on Baby

The domesticity riles and rejoices, as Dijon reckons with what his life looks like now that fatherhood and success are both woven into it. It’s a still-life record made in motion, beginning with him oscillating between a vocal that is part-Anderson .Paak and part-Smokey Robinson on “Baby!” He sings to his child about meeting their mother Joanie, getting her pregnant, and protecting her during a demanding, difficult labor. After lingering in a vocabulary of softness (“I touch your belly”; “Went to cherish your mother”; “Had a laugh with your mother”) and velvety grooves, he coos a gesture of safety: “I said, ‘If I could take your pain, you know I would.’” “Another Baby!” is a post-pregnancy, slinky, and wired detour communicating through an “If I Was Your Girlfriend” beat and “The Living Years” synths. “Struggling to keep composure the way you keep it hot,” he repeats in the intro, before evoking Miss Janet (“What are you, nasty?”) and hiding Pete Rock’s “It’s yours!” part from Nas’ “The World Is Yours” in a set-dressing of funk pleasures. Songs about sex oversaturated the market decades ago, but “Another Baby!” is an unusual yet necessary respite from R&B’s baby-making pantheon, adorned with “a little love and invention” and human connection. Above a fascinating stew of Luther Vandross’ warmth and J Dilla’s pull-apart bedroom production, you can practically see the mirror on the ceiling, and you don’t know whether you should twerk or cry in the reflection.

Baby is full of electronic mood swings and vocal stacking where guitars rambled on Absolutely. Dijon goes as far as manipulating his voice into an instrument, sampling himself over and over atop ecstatic ride grooves and noodly riffs until the phrasings are unrecognizable. Parenthetical interludes—the woozy “(Freak It)” and the tactile “(Referee)”—are blown-out, “testify, electrify” foils to typical middle passages that rest on ambient exercises. “FIRE!” is scorched-earth IDM unfurling in gospel acapella and brief, atonal crescendos, as Dijon jets through suicidal thoughts before collapsing under love, the great extinguisher (“Even when I’m by myself and I start to fantasize, I feel it in the pit of my chest: she loves me”). The plucked “Rewind” is momentarily freed from the album’s bells-and-whistles default before Dijon’s singing melts into harsh, metallic teases.

And Dijon does the dated stuff better than most, preserving the ‘80s and ‘90s in grains and textures rather than copying someone else’s image or attitude, and Baby is meteoric proof that his debut was star-making and his sound will command R&B’s next destiny without leaving any of its ancestry behind. “Automatic” crows in gloomy abundance, glides in physicality (“Just hold me like I’m dying with you”), and capstones with a sample of GZA’s “1991 Freestyle”; the vocals on “Yamaha,” which come in at every direction, boast a handsomeness not unlike prime D’Angelo; and the lower-case, acidic ballad “my man” lands among Dijon’s most awakened efforts: On the imminence of collapse, he raises his voice like Prince does in the “Honey I know, I know, I know times are changing” verse in “Purple Rain.”

Dijon is a chef with no regard for portion control, and his approach is chaotic and illegible (the glitchy, chopped-up gospel circuitry in “HIGHER!”), questionably experimental (the clip of a barking dog mutated into a chaser of noise in “loyal & marie”), and collage-y (the cresting, contrasting synth programming, manipulated pitches, choral tangents, and Top 40 piano drama coagulating in “Yamaha”). For some, that might make for a frustrating listen. For me, it makes writing down whatever hyphenated genres have been swirling around Dijon’s output feel less corny. Alt-R&B, post-pop, anti-Americana, and nu-jungle are all ludicrous descriptors but apropos. His best song, the smooth and rattling “Kindalove,” is four or five songs at once—a product of somebody who’s not just an expert at pop songwriting and curious, offbeat production, but is radically disinterested in being linear or logical. I especially like what Brady Brickner-Wood wrote in The New Yorker this weekend, that Baby’s brilliance is “contingent on its inelegance.” Dijon’s style is psychedelic and full of difference, and none of these songs make much sense when you try to deconstruct them. Your best bet is to fall into each one and let its unlikeliness wash right over you.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.