CARLA THOMAS: COMFORT ME (1965)
1) Comfort Me; 2) No Time To
Lose; 3) Yes, I'm Ready; 4) A Lover's Concerto; 5) I'm For You; 6) What The
World Needs Now; 7) Let It Be Me; 8) A Woman's Love; 9) Will You Love Me
Tomorrow; 10) Forever; 11) Move On Drifter; 12) Another Night Without My Man.
Ah, the good old cover art of understatement.
Is it at all possible to resist upon seeing such a beautiful lady in such a
suggestive pose, with the words COMFORT ME looming large against her
well-coiffed hairdo? That finger alone would be worth at least ten bucks in
1965, and then, as an added bonus, you get twelve pieces of music that you can
take or leave — most importantly, you'll always have Paris, er, I mean, that
album sleeve. Just hang it on the wall, and...
...okay, okay, so we are here to talk strictly
about the music, but truth is, I am not sure what to say. A lot of things
happened in between 1961 and 1965, but you really wouldn't know if you had to
judge by a comparison of Carla Thomas' first and second LP: these here are
twelve more cases of tender balladry and soft R'n'B grooving, all of it pretty
(because of Carla) and solid (because of the Stax backing team), but none of it
particularly memorable. Interestingly enough, a lot of the songs feature Steve
Cropper of Booker T. & The MG's as chief or co-writer, but it's not as if
the man is really working his head off to provide Carla with genius hits: stuff
like ʽA Woman's Loveʼ is based around the same old chord progressions, and on
the whole, I think, Cropper got engaged in this simply to make a little bit of
money in case the record sold well.
Problem is, it did not, and neither did any of
the singles — they all stalled somewhere around No. 70 to No. 90 on the
Billboard charts, not even remotely close to the impact of ʽGee Whizʼ, and it
is easy to see why. As an energetic, groove-centered performer, Carla Thomas
does not qualify: the «hottest» it gets is on songs like ʽNo Time To Loseʼ,
which is basically just a pleading soul number with a bit of vocal aggression
mixed in — nice, but tepid and third-rate. As a balladeer, she had teenage
appeal with ʽGee Whizʼ, but it is not easy for her to make a fully credible
transition into the mature adult stage: she does not have the proper vocal
strength to turn ʽComfort Meʼ into anything more than pleasant background
muzak.
The record also suffers from too little sonic
diversity: when songs as substantially distant as ʽLet It Be Meʼ and ʽWill You
Love Me Tomorrowʼ get pretty much the same jumpy, brass-heavy arrangements, you
begin to seriously wonder if the arrangers and producers actually gave a damn
about what they were doing, or, perhaps, they'd already settled upon the album
cover and thought that it absolutely did not matter what they put under it. The
cover of ʽWill You Love Me Tomorrowʼ is particularly disappointing, but then,
to be honest, nobody really did it full justice until Carole King took the lead
vocal herself.
That said, the album is still fully
recommendable to all fans of the Stax sound — just do not expect it to rage and
rave, everything here is in the soft variety. Soft electric guitars, caressing
brass riffs, soft gospel backing vocals, soft raspy-silky lead singer, the
works. No highlights.
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