Firstly, welcome to our new blog. In these pages we’ll be bringing you album reviews and music news from a variety of genres, old and new. From classic soul to brand new electronica, with funk, hip-hop and anything else we see fit to throw in along the way. Basically, good music that we love and hope to share with a few other kindred spirits.
What better way to start off than with a quick look at a modern soul classic that has recently found its way to my ears. My World was released in June 2009 by Lee Fields and the Expressions, on Brooklyn’s Truth & Soul label who also produced the album. It seems these days that there is a glut of new soul artists striving for an authentic reproduction of the sound found on classic soul records of the late 60s and 70s. 2009 and 2010 in particular saw a large number of releases, and for me, this is one of the best of them.
The lush string arrangements, smooth vocal harmonies and classic instrumentation all combine to achieve as close to authenticity as one could imagine, with Lee Fields’ vocals adding a level of soul that comes straight from the gut. That’s not to say that the music is merely a pastiche of those old soul classics. Lee Fields is the real deal, having begun his recording career in the 70s, releasing a number of rare 7”s as well as the much sought after Let’s Talk it Over LP. Following a quiet spell in the 80s, Fields resurfaced on The Soul Providers album Gimmie the Paw as well as his own Let’s Get a Groove On LP for Desco records in the late 90s. In 2002, the funk laden Problems LP was released on Soul Fire, paving the way for the subsequent resurgence of soul within popular culture.
On My World, that retro, analogue sound is fused with modern sensibilities. From the opening drum break of “Do You Love Me (Like You Say You Do)”, we get a definite hip-hop feel. It seems that after hip-hop artists had sampled soul from records for decades, it was inevitable that soul musicians would start drawing on the loop based rhythms of hip-hop to keep their music feeling shiny and new. The album is similar in this way to Mayer Hawthorne’s A Strange Arrangement, also from 2009, yet My World is a more solid album in terms of consistency. The quality never falters throughout, although my personal favourites would be the anthemic “Love Comes and Goes”, the excellent cover of the Supremes’, “My World Is Empty Without You”, the smooth funk of “Ladies” and the gut wrenching “The Only One Loving You”. The album is also available as an instrumental release.
This is definitely one for the collection. Also worth checking out are his other albums, Problems, Let’s Get a Groove On, and Let’s Talk it Over, the latter of which has been re-mastered and re-released on CD.
Get it on vinyl
Get it on vinyl
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