Earlier this year, Leon Bridges explained his love of vintage soul music in a way that made it seem like it borders on the obsessive. “I became so fascinated with that sound I wanted to recreate it exactly,” he said. In many ways he has achieved his aim: Coming Home, which has clocked up more than 1m YouTube views, sounds like a long-lost soul standard, recorded with era-stamped crackle. On Better Man, which opens almost identically to Smokey Robinson’s I Second That Emotion, he sings “I’d swim the Mississippi river / If you’d give me another start, girl,” before backing singers chime in with some “doo wop”s. Shine is a stirring, horn-led gospel waltz that could have been recorded while Sam Cooke was alive. These are fine songs, sung soulfully, but is that enough? The best retro-soul singers – Amy Winehouse or Cee-Lo Green – take these influences and add something fresh by putting themselves into the record. Bridges has a fantastic voice, but you sense he’s also yet to truly find it.
