Buckley goes full-on funk here, and what great stuff it is. It’s interesting to contrast this with the previous Temptations album for different approaches to roughly the same musical genre. For some reason I can’t quite explain (and I hope isn’t purely due to skin tone), the Temptations still feel like “proper” soul while Buckley feels a bit ersatz.
The difference, perhaps, is that the Temptations have a mix of different vocalists with different range, including Melvin Franklin’s bass. Buckley, on the other hand, does all the vocals himself, but he is helped by his voice which can go all over the place in terms of pitch and timbre, moving from a falsetto to a growl in a single interval. This is best on display on the track Devil Eyes where he breaks into what I can only describe as a cross between vocal warm-up exercises and jungle noises, but great fun stuff it is, then breaking out into a scorching bit of guitar work from either Buckley himself or Joe Falsia, and then a conga break from at least one, perhaps both, of the two conga players credited on this album – King Errisson and Carter CC Collins.
In this kind of sound he reminded me a bit of Jim Morrisson at his peak, or maybe Jagger. There are few vocalists who can carry off “Eugh! Hah! Brrrrrrrrrr! Nananananana!” and get away with it. The final track Make It Right, with its refrain of “beat me, whip me, spank me, oh make it right again” is also reminiscent of those two singers. It’s a great track, carried along by strings with sense of urgency.
There’s only one entirely non-soul track on the album, the lengthy Hong Kong Bar, which is a very low-key piece featuring only acoustic guitar giving a kind of ongoing bluesy lick, faintly mixed hand-claps for percussion, and Buckley’s voice, but that very simplicity makes it a good showcase for both voice and guitar, very atmospheric.
All in all, I really liked this one. It’s probably the most immediately accessible of Buckley’s work (even if it lacks the inventiveness of Goodbye and Hello).
Comments
Post a Comment