This is a wonderful double disc album of real Soul classics, a well chosen bunch of songs, that border also on Disco, Motown, and Pop, some of these tracks i have nowhere else in my collection, so this makes these disc all the more welcome, virtually all of the music comes from the Seventies, what a great decade that was, and i personally remember many of these tracks in the charts when i was younger, but sadly i wasn't into this type of music at the time, mainly leaning towards Glam Rock and Punk, with some New Wave chucked in also, now this stuff really gets to me as i'm older, even tracks that i don't think are great, and i could easily live without, i'm now developing a real fondness for, nothing sounds out of place, everything fits together, it's not just about the individual songs, but how all together they make a lovely bigger picture, i've wrote about these disc in my Blog twice before [17th January 2012 & 30th November 2010].
Well a whole bunch of songs blew me away, tracks 5-6, 10, 16-17, 19, 28, 30, 32-33, 37 & 40, too many tracks to talk about individually, so it would be nice to pick just two, and talk about them both more extensively, but giving the discs another little sample, wow that's a hard task, there's so many moments within tracks that really got me going, however here they both are, with a more extended synopsis,
16 Lou Rawls [You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine] - What a voice!, as smooth as butter, and so soulful, he's able to turn small phrases into large pleadings, the way he can change the meaning of words just by the way he sings them, almost perfection, in the intro it's that click click click from the percussion that deliciously gets on your nerves in a nice way [0:01-0:18], and when Rawls comes in, the voice blows you away, and the piano echoes the voice, a great and satisfying technique, Rawls can really sing with power in the chorus, and it's good to hear the click, click, click again, that merges the chorus and the second verse [1:02+], and when the chorus comes back again, this time it adds female backing singers [1:54+], the piano now uses a lovely down the keyboard glissando to bridge the chorus and the third verse [2:15], ha ha very nice, such a nice beat throughout, the epitome of a Soul song.
30 William De Vaughn [Be Thankful For What You've Got] - I had to put this in, this was one of those tracks i spoke about at the beginning that i can easily live without, yet now i find a real fondness for this, it has a gorgeous bongo solo at the beginning, and then the Hammond swirls just come in, now that's real soul [0:00-0:25], and the guitars and voice come in [0:17+ & 0:25], the twangy guitar makes a real vibe to it, and then later a very inauspicious Vibist [Vince Montana] comes in [1:08+], what a tremendous instrument it is, it makes such a difference to the song, the lyrics are fairly repetitive, the original version lasted just over seven minutes, and on this disc it cuts two minutes off the instrumental in the second half of the song, the vocals end and there's some of the instrumental on this version [3:43+], i love the way the Vibist gets a lovely solo in [4:35-5:23], which takes the track into the fade, it's a real joy to fall in love with this song.
30 William De Vaughn [Be Thankful For What You've Got] - I had to put this in, this was one of those tracks i spoke about at the beginning that i can easily live without, yet now i find a real fondness for this, it has a gorgeous bongo solo at the beginning, and then the Hammond swirls just come in, now that's real soul [0:00-0:25], and the guitars and voice come in [0:17+ & 0:25], the twangy guitar makes a real vibe to it, and then later a very inauspicious Vibist [Vince Montana] comes in [1:08+], what a tremendous instrument it is, it makes such a difference to the song, the lyrics are fairly repetitive, the original version lasted just over seven minutes, and on this disc it cuts two minutes off the instrumental in the second half of the song, the vocals end and there's some of the instrumental on this version [3:43+], i love the way the Vibist gets a lovely solo in [4:35-5:23], which takes the track into the fade, it's a real joy to fall in love with this song.
