Dylan LeBlanc: Cautionary Tale

Dylan LeBlanc
Cautionary Tale
(Single Lock Records)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

For a while it seemed as though Dylan LeBlanc’s rising star might have fallen. After a highly-touted 2010 debut at the age of 20, LeBlanc kept a low profile over the next few years, serving as an occasional opening act and quietly releasing a follow-up to mixed reviews. But with his third record, Cautionary Tale, LeBlanc has found firm footing with the help of fellow Muscle Shoals musicians John Paul White and Ben Tanner, who have helped the Shreveport, Louisiana native flesh out his musical strengths and make the most mature, cohesive record in his still-fresh career.

Cautionary Tale is an album of reckoning with youthful mistakes set to familiar sounds from the country-soul crooner. “Easy Way Out” rides a Neil Young “Southern Man” chord progression as it playfully bounces around cliches of retrospective regret. “Cautionary Tale” is just that: a self-conscious warning call with a warm R&B bounce about a young man who knows he’s courting danger but carries on regardless.

Dylan LeBlanc, still just 25 years old, has an easy knack for a melody and his voice possesses a graceful purity, but his main flaw has always been his propensity to hide behind his talents and retreat into the musicality of his own voice with little regard for his listener. He has a tendency, in other words, to mumble. Though he still occasionally falls into that trap on Cautionary Tale, LeBlanc’s voice is as expressive as ever, even on quiet whispers (“Lightning And Thunder,” “Paradise”), which are LeBlanc’s stock-in-trade.

As LeBlanc has gotten more confident as a vocalist, so too has he found a newly pointed direction as a songwriter. LeBlanc delivers a number of sophisticated, stinging one-liners throughout, offering graceful couplets like, “You can’t kill the pain with an age old shame/ But I can’t get a word in with myself.” On Cautionary Tale, LeBlanc offers cutting introspection that sounds so good it’s easy to miss.