On misfit’s miscellany “what’s normal anyway,” Miguel Pimentel touchingly enumerates his internal contradictions: “too opinionated for the pacifists,” “too far out for the in crowd,” etc. He’s a mess of them—a sensitive dreamer, a flamboyant bad boy, a wide-eyed romantic, a wantonly lascivious horndog. Wildheart is darker than its immaculately crafted predecessor, toughening up Kaleidoscope Dream’s paisley swirl of bedroom R&B and blissy pop with snarling rock guitars and hard-edged funk, but its palette remains expansive.
Take back-to-back sex jams that are—respectively—sweet enough to sing for your grandma (the luxuriously creamy “Co ffee”) and filthy enough to make Prince blush (“the valley.”) Speaking of the Purple One … well, it’s hard not to, and hard to overstate his overarching influence on Miguel’s entire fearlessly polymorphic mien, which also makes it tempting to mentally position this set alongside his own similarly audacious, inventive (and dirtyminded) third, and dream wild dreams about what’s still to come. For now, if he’s still too hippy-dippy for the badasses, too edgy for the soul heads, too smooth for the punks, whatever—well, that’s their loss.
—K. Ross Ho ffman
