Tracks: Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye) // Cry to Me // Won’t You Give Him (One More Chance) // If You Need Me // Hard, It Ain’t Hard // Can’t Nobody Love You // Just Out of Reach // You’re Good for Me // You Can’t Love ‘Em All // Someone to Love Me // Beautiful Brown Eyes // He’ll Have to Go
Well this is a nifty album. An album that grows on you. Not only is Solomon Burke a great singer, a former undertaker and a Monarch of the Realm, but he’s in possession of that chief virtue of any singer/songwriter – a healthy disrespect for genre conventions. It’s in the title, really – he brings the rock, he brings the soul, and on several tracks he brings a strange, vaguely Cuban hybridisation of the two. You have to love an album that invites direct comparison to Ben E. King, Burt Bacharach and Marty Robbins. Yes, there’s country here too! “Just Out of Reach” is an honest to goodness country ballad. And he covers a Woody Guthrie song! How wonderful is that?
And not only are all these songs really well-performed, but the arrangements are great. The basic core of the group is Solomon, bass, drums, and guitar. The drums are spare but lovely, and you get some neat semi-Latin rhythms on “You Can’t Love ‘Em All”. The bass is... serviceable. It serves the songs great, but it’s never flashy. The guitar, however, is absolutely amazing. You get spiralling, picked rhythms on most of the tracks, all a little bit country, and then you get some ace bluesy noodling on the slow gospel “Someone to Love Me” (which sounds kind of like Otis Redding). This track also features a truly wonderful backing chorus, which is something that pops-up through a lot of the album. Additional elements, such as piano, choir, and the odd bit of brass (and even a woodwind, at one point) are sprinkled liberally through the record, but rather than saturating the songs, they’re used intelligently to augment the recordings. The result is an album which is really very, very well produced. Once again, the most obvious comparison would be Otis Redding, whose Otis Blue, with its stripped-down production, seems to have taken a few pointers from the Solomon Sound. In any case, I really like “Someone to Love Me”. If I have learnt one thing from doing this it is that I have all the time in the world for slow-burn gospel.
So on top of this we have Solomon Burke’s singing, which is pretty great. The guy was apparently a preacher before he became a singer, and the gospel influence is pretty prominent throughout this album. Thankfully unlike Otis Redding (who I will continue to compare him with) Burke doesn’t feel the need to ramble about over his songs with a complete disregard for the rhythm of his backing track. His voice fits with the album perfectly, in that it’s very good while at the same time never flashy for flashiness’ sake.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to all of this. While the album is immaculately put-together, it also suffers from being kind of lacklustre at times in terms of song choices, and in a few instances the tracks are getting by more on the strength of Burke as a performer than of the songs themselves. Still, this actually contributes to the charm of the album – it’s a good, old-fashioned pop album, with no real low-points and the one genuine high in “Cry to Me”. “Cry to Me” was used in Dirty Dancing, didn’t you know? One thing I never understood about the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (and believe me, I am intimately familiar with the Dirty Dancing soundtrack – ah, to be young in the early 90s and have an older sister) is that they used all those old songs to evoke a period feel, and then they dumped-in stuff like “Hungry Eyes”, “The Time of My Life” and Patrick Swayze classic “She’s Like the Wind” (someone was hoping for a chance to audition for the Scorpions). I mean, I like all three of those songs (shut up) but I always thought it a little jarring. Maybe it was meant to evoke the timelessness of the story? In any case, the use of “The Time of My Life” in the climactic dance-party sequence does make thematic sense as a way of pointing towards the exciting new world of the future, without actually having to pay the rights to use a Beatles song. Still...
In any case, this is a pretty neat little album. “Cry to Me” is amazing, “You Can’t Love ‘Em All” has some exceptionally goofy lyrics but sounds wonderful, “Someone To Love Me” is gorgeous and “Just Out of Reach” is a lovely country ballad. I’m also kind of fond of “He’ll Have to Go”, but that has more to do with my Dad have a tendency to burst into loungey renditions of it at inappropriate moments (another favourites of his happens to be “Evergreen” by Barbara Streisand). I wouldn’t call this a masterpiece, but it’s a damned nice listen.
7.5
Download: Solomon Burke - Cry to Me MP3
Download: Solomon Burke - Someone to Love Me MP3
I wish I could dance.
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