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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.
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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.
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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.