Blue Largo 2022
Veterans of South Californian rhythm-and-blues scene serve up a series of career-defining moments and soothe the listener’s psyche.
Got To Believe
Everything people need to know about this ensemble is eloquently – and with a lot of gusto – expressed in their fifth album’s irresistible, handclaps-abetted opening track “A World Without Soul” which displays invigorating runs of ivories, stinging twang of guitar and splashes of brass as a perfect foil for a parchment-dry, if captivating, voice; yet once one’s curiosity has been satisfied, the audience’s appetite has been whetted as well, and “Got To Believe” can wet the fertile ground of attention only in its entirety. On the ten originals and sole cover, all careening to classic Muscle Shoals sound yet going beyond the Alabaman template, guitarist Eric Lieberman, vocalist Alicia Aragon and their friends play with the listener’s grasp of their chosen idiom, so the presence of “soul” in no less than three song titles should not mislead those lured into the band’s joie de vivre – and there’s a lot of clues to get into the spirit of things and have profound fun the musicians provide in spades.
The skeleton key to such a triumph might lie in the platter’s lone borrowed piece, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” that many an artist did but just a few succeeded in doing justice to, and this collective join the latter category with their deeply felt, unhurriedly hard-hitting delivery of the perennial. However, while “Gospel Music” switches from funereal dirge to a catchy slab of finger-popping boogie, and “Disciple Of Soul” – which prompted the ensemble to enter the studio in the first place, in order to cut the tune in time to show the result to Little Steven whose political audacity it’s dedicated to – serves up a vibrant slice of reggae, the record’s entrancing titular number harks back to the early ’60s calypso-smeared girl-group pop. As Taryn Donath’s piano ripple embrace the ebullient jive of “What We Gonna Do” and the sweet sentiment of “Soul Meeting” with equal elegance, the retro-styled likes of “Rear View Mirror” get elevated to the here and now, and when the countrified “Santa Fe Bound” arrives on the slider-oiled lines to close the album, there’s no going back to pandemic-induced sadness “Got To Believe” got swept aside by in 2020.
It’s time to celebrate the present and to believe – and live – in the moment.
****4/5
