Really running low on albums that AMG regards as classics now, finally getting around to some soul and R&B albums that they liked.
The surprises start early: four songs, three of them topping the nine-minute mark; that's not the album structure I expected from Issac Hayes. I expected a fillery run through 13 or so 3 minute crooners, but this is more like James Brown than, well, I don't know anyone in this genre enough to fill out the other half of that simile. Yet! Talk to me in a month.
The first track, Walk on By, is the highlight. It's a swanky, tightly performed, slightly overblown song of heartbreak that swerves and meanders and soars and swoons at turns. Way more epic than I expected. Track 2 gets a bit more psychedelic and Funkadelic, and similarly takes its time going hither and tither as the groove demands. By the time I reached the closer, I though I knew what to expect, but I was wrong. That thing starts off with 10 minutes of spoken word monologue over the sparest of beats, before slow-climaxing in an ethereal, eternal buildup. It is in utterly no hurry what so ever. The payoff doesn't quite justify the buildup, but I have to at least admire the nerve.
Ok, enough about song structure. The actual performances are impressive, and the bass playing in particular is inspirational, just riding up and down and around completely effortlessly. Hayes is actually nothing like James Brown in the delivery, singing about wasted love and losing love and crying and generally being a super sensitive guy. It kind of works, somehow. The whole package is so epic, so taffy pulled in structure, so utterly disconnected from time that it achieves a kind of transcendence. Maybe I'm just shock and awed into appreciation, but this is the kind of shit this project is made for: never knew the guy had it in him 4/5
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