There’s always been a hint of rebellion in Daniel Caesar’s reverence. On “Praise Break,” from his debut EP, he sang, “If I should die before I wake/Thank God I left this pseudo place,” an unholy hymn from a devout soul. Caesar’s music has long been caught between worship and doubt, his tender falsetto a vessel for both. Raised in a strict Adventist household, he filtered gospel’s moral certainties through the restless eyes of a skeptic. His earliest songs played like whispered confessions from someone sneaking out of church to smoke behind the building—holy chords laced with sin. When he left home after clashing with his family, the sounds of Toronto’s streets made their way into his work: ambient city noise, R&B guitars, a fragile sense of freedom. “Lay in your bed, reap what you sow,” he warned on his second EP, as if already wondering whether liberation could coexist with grace.
By the time Freudian arrived in 2017, Caesar had polished that tension into seduction. Gospel became less a doctrine than a texture—another color to shade his stories of heartbreak, lust, and longing. The music was romantic, even carnal, his devotion redirected from God to the person in front of him. Across Case Study 01 and Never Enough, Caesar’s focus shifted further inward, into a sleek, guitar-driven R&B world of love, regret, and quiet arrogance. But Son of Spergy—his fourth album and most openly spiritual work—reaches back toward the faith he once fled. Named after his father, the singer and pastor Norwill Simmonds, the record attempts reconciliation: between spirit and flesh, son and father, sinner and saint. Caesar opens with a plea—“Lord, let your blessings rain down”—delivered in a radiant gospel arrangement featuring Sampha and Tiana Kruškić. It sounds like redemption. But what follows feels more like regression.
For all its lofty ambition, Son of Spergy never locates the spiritual crisis it wants to resolve. Caesar sings about fatherhood, repentance, and rebirth, but his words skim the surface. “Have a Baby (With Me)”—one of several songs co-written with Mustafa—casts domesticity as divine fulfillment, but the sentiment collapses under the weight of its own sincerity. “It’s too late for our dreams/We can make a new dream/Have a baby with me,” he offers, like a Hallmark card set to vibey R&B. Where the great soul singers made desperation sound like revelation, Caesar mistakes literalism for depth; his yearning feels curiously bloodless. “Sign of the Times” fares no better, pairing visions of Madonna and child with an awkward rap verse about turning 30 and wanting kids. What could have been an exploration of faith’s erotic edge—how love and belief blur—lands instead as clumsy confession.
When Caesar loosens his grip, the music breathes. “Baby Blue” glows with the warmth of classic slow-jam romanticism—plush strings, brushed drums, and Caesar’s voice suspended in honey. For a moment, he channels the doo-wop innocence that first made his falsetto magnetic. But then he hands the mic to his father, whose spoken sermon about Jesus’ transcendent love drowns the song’s delicate intimacy. Caesar’s desire to weave together the sacred and the secular is genuine, even touching, but his touch is heavy. Where Mustafa’s Dunya binds faith and grief into a lived theology, Son of Spergy mistakes quotation for conviction. “Root of All Evil” gestures vaguely at temptation without naming any, while “Moon,” a collaboration with Bon Iver, trades in the weakest of metaphors—fighters who “keep fighting,” saints without stories.
The tragedy is that Caesar’s arrangements are so exquisite they nearly disguise the lyrical emptiness. Alongside longtime collaborators Jordan Evans, Matthew Burnett, and Dylan Wiggins, he crafts music that glows like candlelight through stained glass. The production is airily precise—part chamber pop, part gospel séance—its harmonies and textures recalling SAULT or L’Rain at their most celestial. “Touching God,” featuring a murmured Blood Orange verse and a soaring Yebba outro, nearly justifies the record’s ambitions. Its final swell—Yebba’s voice erupting like a Pentecostal vision—is what the rest of Son of Spergy aches to be: faith as ecstasy, doubt as deliverance.
But that moment never returns. Caesar’s writing remains trapped between prayer and platitude, too polite to risk revelation. His past work thrived on friction—between holy and human, love and guilt—but Son of Spergy feels purged of tension. It’s beautiful, yes, but inert, like an empty cathedral echoing with perfect reverb. For an artist once defined by his questioning, that absence of fire is its own kind of heresy
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