He ends with his most left-field track, “Gibberish”. This is the last paragraph of my popmatters review of the first album He's more than capable of creating atmospheres and moods through his arrangements, and yeah he kinda trips over his own feet occasionally It might be telling that my favorite song of his is "gibberish", which doesnt really have any lyrics to speak of It doesnt bother me too much tho, like you said i'm basically a fan of his music first Yeah he's definitely a boring lyricist - i realy like the first one but there's this disparity b/w the great beats and the kinda bland lyrics he sings This album is good tho, it's really glitzy, almost cheesy in places, but it's a bit funkier He might be a boring lyricist or personality maybe idk there's something that doesn't totally grasp me about his music I get this feeling that he's obv a technically great musician, his arrangements are greatīut. I'm just listening thru laptop speakers right now but Bottom line: the album is one of the stronger pop-R&B releases of the last few years.Too lazy to take these thoughts and make them a cohesive post Enjoyment of the album will be heightened if you are down with Leslie's brainiac schemer persona, but it is not a requirement. On five of the album's 12 songs, he plays and sings everything, while the others tend to involve no more than one additional musician (a not-exactly-heterogeneous crew including Hall & Oates and Saturday Night Live band alum T-Bone Wolk and fashion model slash rumored Leslie love interest Chanel Iman). It could be that he was too busy with everything else and determined, after running some figures through a formula (he graduated from Harvard at the age of 19), that his creative energies could be optimized by spending more time on hooks and high-hat sounds. And that is a blessing in disguise since the lyrics are sometimes flat-out clumsy. As a singer, Leslie is passable, slightly nasally, just skilled enough to pull off a falsetto without sounding silly it's certainly the melodies and production flourishes, not the voice, that stick in the memory.
It's a slick update of In Search Of…'s springy pop-R&B (a la the album's original mix), one with a clever breakdown where the song slips abruptly into a swirl of synthesizers and Leslie's falsetto refrain.
What follows is not a series of radio killers but plenty of depth warranting repeat plays, led by "Quicksand," featuring Neptunes/ N.E.R.D accessory Brent Paschke on guitar and bass. Instrumentally all synth trills, fillips, and bullfrog croaks, with charmingly clownish boasts on top, "Diamond Girl" also leads off the album, and it is followed by "Addiction," a crafty post-Neptunes production rooted in a barely present kick-drum pattern and synthetic hand percussion patter, ribboned in wavering (and practically queasy) synth flossing.
Those first two singles, "Diamond Girl" and "Addiction" (neither of which cracked the Top 30 of the R&B/Hip-Hop chart), are the best of the set, easily the standouts. And the album did, indeed, nearly shoot its wad before it became a physical object.
Ryan Leslie came out in February 2009 with strikingly low-profile presentation: a simple black-and-white cover shot and a no-frills booklet with track credits and nothing else, not necessarily what was expected from a flashy and shrewd self-promoter who hired a staff of videographers to document his moves for a well-stocked archive of YouTube clips. When it came out, Cassie's mainstream blitz, engineered in many ways by the always visible Leslie, was two and a half years in the past, and a pair of lead-up singles had already fallen off the charts, released up to just over a year prior to the final product. The release date and presentation made Ryan Leslie's self-titled album seem somewhat anticlimactic.