John Legend
Love in The Future

Three years after his successful collaboration with The Roots on the excellent "Wake Up!" and five years since his last solo album, "Evolver," John Legend returns to enchant audiences around the world with his always warm and beautiful voice. Benefiting from the production of Kanye West, the talented American singer-songwriter resumes his artistic journey where he left off with the previous album, i.e., a soul that, while remaining anchored to its more traditional sounds, doesn't shy away from flirting, not even too subtly, with the most recent black music, without, however, falling into the cheap pseudo-ghetto cheesiness, and into neo-soul. While "Evolver" had seemed like a somewhat messy attempt to renew, clashing the modern and traditional too roughly, "Love in The Future" seems to mark for John the achievement of a good balance between the two sides.

Old style and modernity indeed blend perfectly in this latest studio effort by Legend, without one excessively overpowering the other; of course, there are tracks where the echoes of "Get Lifted" and "Once Again" are more pronounced, such as "So Gone," "We Loved It," and "Aim High," with almost jazz-like atmospheres, and the splendid "Angel (Interlude)," a successful duet with Stacy Barthe, but the rest of the album takes a decidedly different direction, divided as it is between splendid piano-voice ballads ("All Of Me," "Dreams," "You & I (Nobody in The World"), more markedly R'n'B episodes ("Who Do You Think We Are," "Open Your Eyes"), and some pleasant and successful experimentation, like the tribal-soul of "Made to Love" (featuring the talented Kimbra, known for her duet with Gotye in "Somebody That I Used to Know") and the electronic of "Asylum". All this, thanks to Kanye West's excellent production, manages to be extraordinarily cohesive and, perhaps for this reason, a bit monotonous, still conveying the intentional impression of not wanting to innovate anything, remaining anchored to its roots while nevertheless looking to the future. Worth noting is John's voice, always warm, powerful, and capable of perfectly interpreting both more demanding and lighter pieces.

"Love in The Future" is, in short, a pleasant album, recommended to genre lovers and, more generally, to those who want to listen to some good singer-songwriter music. However, a bit of courage to venture into bolder and more eclectic experiments like those found with his younger colleague Janelle Monáe would not have hurt; nothing that affects the enjoyment of what remains in any case a good album. 

Note: the rating would be 3.5.