Drum tones are often woody and hollow keyboards and strings open up hazy spaces, sometimes without a beat. Legend’s music turns less glossy: earthier and often spookier. With a producer and co-writer from outside the usual precincts of pop and hip-hop - the guitarist Blake Mills, who has worked with Alabama Shakes and Fiona Apple - Mr. In his new songs, love can be a counterattack on mortality, a dangerous compulsion, a realm of sweaty adventures, a legacy from father to daughter, an escape from social media and a bulwark against forces of divisiveness. But “Darkness and Light,” his fifth studio album, treats love as something far more complex than a panacea and a fount of perpetual reassurance, with music to match. Without it, the love songs that regularly place him in the Top 10 - megahits like “All of Me” from 2013 - are anodyne enough to work as wedding songs they’re a worthy and lucrative enterprise that can leave an unctuous, saccharine aftertaste. A little darkness serves John Legend well.
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