Hey, tonight we've got soul man Eli "Paperboy" Reed, the kind of guy record nerds love to hate, until they learn to love him. Just ask Maloney, who
wrote the Paperboy up in last week's glossy. An excerpt:
Sure, Come and Get It doesn't belong to the J.B.'s-by-proxy school of hard funk that seems to be the standardized sound for the latest crop of R&B revivalists, and the production is super-clean — some of my peers have been throwing around pejoratives like "Huey Lewis" and "Hall & Oates," which is just kinda catty — but damn, does the Paperboy know his way around a melody. And by emphasizing the melodic over the rhythmic, Reed stands out from the Dap-Kings wannabes, and lands closer to the classic compositions of Hayes and Porter or Holland-Dozier-Holland. He's not in the same league as Hayes and Porter or Holland-Dozier-Holland yet, but he's a lot closer to that mythical soul ideal than many of his peers, which is close enough for me. From the soulful strut of opener "Young Girl" — an obscure Boston soul track from way back, natch — to the fiery, fuzzed-up funk of closer "Explosion," Come and Get It is an album steeped in a love of soul music, unsullied by a desire to be anything more than that — no hipster fetishism, no contemporary production tricks, and, best of all, no bullshit.
9 p.m. at Mercy Lounge, $12.
