Four songs into his set at XOYO, a one-off London appearance ahead of his new album Wildheart, due out next week, Miguel Pimentel starts talking about programming. Not what people do to computers – that would be incongruous, even for this risk-taking R&B heartthrob – but what society does when it tames us into accepting conventional goals at the expense of our own hopes and dreams.
It comes at us from all angles, this programming – from the media, from our friends and families – and Miguel has had it up to here. “I’m going to say ‘fuck that’,” he states for the record, before elaborating on how we can fulfil our destinies without letting negativity impede our path to self-realisation.
It’s an unexpected turn of events, considering what a straightforward good time we were having moments earlier. The show kicked off with Miguel and his five-piece band, dressed all in white, playing the sweet crowd-pleaser Sure Thing from his debut album, and The Thrill, a stripped-back, soaring number from his excellent 2012 follow-up Kaleidoscope Dream.
The 29-year-old gets labelled an R&B artist but that category – unlike the funk-tastic white jacket he’s wearing tonight – fits him less and less comfortably as his sound expands with each album. Kaleidoscope Dream indulges his love of power ballads and psychedelic rock while referencing the Zombies and 70s soul singer William DeVaughn in his lyrics. Miguel has described his music as “fly, funkadelic, intergalactic-hip-hop-meets-sexy-orgasmic crazy, dope shit”, which is as close as anyone’s likely to get to pinning it down.
His third album continues to delight in mixing sounds and styles, but it’s several shades darker than its predecessor. The third track Miguel plays tonight, …goingtohell, begins with motorcycle revs, then chugs moodily down the road to perdition (“Only you can save me, I’m a sinner”). Next he segues into Hollywood Dreams, which pours cold water on the desire for fame that burns in his native Los Angeles. Even when his music takes a sombre turn, however, Miguel finds it hard to suppress his positivity. He has a reputation for hurling himself around during performances but tonight his room for manoeuvre is limited so he becomes a blur of miniaturised movements: tightly executed heel-spins, repeated quiff-combing motions, the odd five-metre dash across the stage.
The other thing Miguel can’t, or won’t, repress is his flirting. The white jacket is the first of several layers of clothing removed until the singer is down to a low-cut T-shirt, which he raises in coy “hot in here” motions, affording glimpses of his ripped, tattooed torso. At the end of a slowed-down remix of How Many Drinks? he asks if it would take three drinks, two – or fewer – for us to be won over by his charms. The consensus is that Miguel has seduced us already.
This may explain why he feels confident enough to stop the music several times to talk about transcending the programming and braving the cycle of desperation and hope that awaits us when we commit to following our dreams. What we need, according to Miguel, is self-belief, a quality the singer has in abundance and would like to share with everyone in the room. “I believe that you can believe in yourself,” he assures us.
Just as his disquisition is threatening to collapse under the weight of its earnestness, he pulls it back by distilling his message into a pithy slogan – “Fuck normality” – and launching into Adorn, his 2012 breakthrough single.
If other tracks on Kaleidoscope Dream and the new album explore darker regions of sexuality and self-obsession, the mood on this one, elevated by Miguel’s ardent falsetto, is sunny. He pairs the crowd into dancing partners and initiates games of call and response. At the climax, after any lingering resistance to his charm offensive has been quashed, he bounds around shaking hands. “That was a small example of how love can bring people together,” he says, beaming. “We need more love in this world.”
Having reached the concluding point in tonight’s lecture, Miguel leaves the stage with his T-shirt on. His message may not be the most radical but it’s coming from the right place. Miguel has a big heart, it transpires, and he doesn’t need to remove any more clothes to prove it.
