Soul Food
A survey of recent discs that might otherwise fall through the cracks
by Bill Friskics-Warren
This is the first installment of a more or less monthly record review column I’ll be writing in these pages. Its contents will vary, encompassing everything from pop, rock, and gospel to jazz, R&B, and rap—as the above headline promises, anything but country. Well, maybe some alt-country, like the sublime new Alejandro Escovedo album, a review of which appears below. But no mainstream country. It’s not that I have anything against the records Music Row is churning out—I write about them elsewhere and often. It’s just that there’s a lot of other stuff out there that too often falls between the cracks.
As for particulars, each column will include reviews of five or six albums, at least one of them made locally, or by an act with overt ties to Nashville. Most will be worth hearing, if not owning. But every month I’ll also write about one record that someone should have warned you against, whether that means urging you to avoid it outright or just cautioning you not to buy the hype that’s grown up around it. My goal is to be fair and concise, and most of all to engage each album on its own terms. Finally, please don’t call me if you want me to hear a record; e-mail all tips and queries to friskics@aol.com.
India.Arie, Acoustic Soul (Motown) “I’m not the average girl in your video,” proclaims this velvet-voiced real live woman whose mama taught her that “it’s not what she wears, but what she knows.” Positive, history-conscious, and Afrocentric, Atlanta-based Arie is cut from much the same spiritual and cultural cloth as Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Arie’s acoustic-guitar-based odes to brown skin, Stevie “Wonderful,” and seeing God in others are closer to singer-songwriter quiet storm than anything else—more Roberta Flack than Mary J. Blige. You’ll find no rhymes and next to no samples here, but most of Arie’s beats, many of them supplied by Nashville co-producers Mark Batson and Blue Miller, are funky enough. Better yet, she’s at home enough in her own skin to reel off shout-outs to Tammi Terrell and Karen Carpenter in the very same breath.
Olu Dara, Neighborhoods (Atlantic) Dara’s pan-Africanism is an ecumenist’s dream, and this, the fiftysomething jazzman’s second solo album, is even more sweeping than Natchez to New York, his kaleidoscopic 1998 debut. There’s the swamp-gospel of “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” the Congolese bomp of “Massamba,” the second-line strut of “Herbman,” the Bahamian psalmody of Joseph Spence’s “Out on the Rolling Sea.” There’s plenty of On the Corner-style polyrhythms and “A Day in the Life” rhymes as well, just what you might expect from an alum of New York City’s omnivorous loft scene and the father of rapper Nas. If Dara’s menu sounds a bit diffuse, rest assured, it all congeals around his sugar-cured baritone and his buttermilk cornet, a pair of comforting, down-home instruments that render virtually everything here the sonic equivalent of soul food. Sticks to your ribs too.
Alejandro Escovedo, A Man Under the Influence (Bloodshot) The publishers of No Depression had folks scratching their heads when the publication named Escovedo its “artist of the decade” three to four years ago. But now that Alejandro’s put together a string of six undeniable albums, what once smacked of tastemaking today looks like prescience bordering on clairvoyance. Having gone through more than his share of hardships—including wicked bouts with the needle and hepatitis C, as well as the suicide of his ex-wife—Escovedo has become something of a patron saint of survivors, an inveterate and at once tough- and tenderhearted rocker who’s rusting more gracefully than any onetime punk worth his or her piercings could hope to. From elegiac country-rock (“Rhapsody”) to swaggering hard rock (“Castanets”) to penumbral chamber-rock (“Follow You Down”), every note Escovedo and his band produce here witnesses to beauty amid brokenness without stooping to romanticize it. Escovedo plays Wednesday, May 2, at 12th & Porter Playroom.
Pat McLaughlin, Uncle Pat (Cream Style) The rap against this hometown hero is that his records never channel the soulful kinesis of his live shows—that they fail to capture those moments when he locks onto a groove and his hips, gutturals, and chicken-scratch guitar licks seem to emanate from a single stream of energy. Unlikely as it might seem, this clutch of band demos is the exception to the rule; by distilling each track down to its rhythmic essence, Pat and his pals slide right into that elusive pocket nearly every time. The libido-stoked “Really Feely Girlfriend,” the juking “Two Lights in the Nighttime,” and the day-job blues of “Drivin’ for Dominoes” all are vintage McLaughlin—gritty and lowdown, with Pat moaning and groaning every which way but on the beat. Even better are the handful of lilting acoustic-guitar-based numbers, bittersweet soul workouts galvanized by churchy organ fills that’ll put you in mind of Rick Danko singing the Impressions songbook. “Hey Now Now” is an out-and-out wonder, a shang-a-langing prequel to “Brown-Eyed Girl” and maybe the most unabashedly romantic record this side of “Betcha By Golly, Wow.”
Shuggie Otis, Inspiration Information (Luaka Bop) Otis is the son of legendary R&B bandleader Johnny “Willie and the Hand Jive” Otis. He’s some guitarslinger too—witness his slash-and-burn fretwork on Cold Shot, his dad’s 1971 blues LP. Nevertheless, this reissue of Shuggie’s long-deleted 1974 album hardly presents him as the great lost funk-soul brother cultists are making him out to be. Nor is he the second coming of Marvin or Curtis, much less a precursor to mad-skills cut-creator DJ Shadow, all of which Luaka Bop honcho David Byrne swears in the testimonial that accompanied advance copies of the disc. More than anything else, Otis’ swan song (at least for now) is a by turns funky and noodling harbinger of trip-hop and acid jazz, a low-key, drum-machine-aided groove session born of a solitary knob-twirler’s mind. In other words, heady wallpaper best suited to stoner woolgathering or light housework. Avatars of cool who’ve convinced themselves the record is a classic just because no one bought it back in the day need only compare Shuggie’s aspirated original version of “Strawberry Letter 23” (included here as a bonus track) to the Brothers Johnson’s lush 1977 hit remake.
