CANDI STATON: WHO'S HURTING NOW? (2009)
1) Breaking Down Slow; 2)
Who's Hurting Now?; 3) I Feel The Same; 4) Mercy Now; 5) I Don't Know; 6)
Lonely Don't; 7) Get Your Hands Dirty; 8) Dust On My Pillow; 9) Cry Baby Cry;
10) I Don't Want For Anything; 11) The Light In Your Eyes.
But no, the story does not really end with Nightlites. Like Al Green, Staton spent
nearly two decades doing nothing but gospel — enabling her to stay away from
all the detrimental developments in contemporary R&B — and like Al Green,
she eventually re-emerged in the early 2000s: rested, rejuvenated, and behaving
like the last two decades simply did not happen. In fact, neither did the later
half of the Seventies, and that entire disco period was just a bad dream — as
long as we can still remember Dave Crawford with a good word, this attitude
suits me just fine, too. Her first new stint with secular music occurred on His Hands, recorded in 2006 for the
British indie label Honest Jon's Records (founded with the assistance of Blur's
Damon Albarn, no less), but the full-fledged comeback was Who's Hurting Now three years later, made at Abbey Road Studios
with a bunch of American musicians, including Tony Crow from Lambchop on keyboards
and Candi's own son Marcus Williams on drums.
The material here is mostly, if not all,
modern, contributed by various contemporary songwriters who usually provide
standard fodder for blues and country bands — so one shouldn't really expect
anything groundbreaking from this batch. What matters is not the melodies, but
the sound of the whole thing: the record is executed strictly in late Sixties /
early Seventies style, with a soul / gospel / funk / blues-rock vibe that
defiantly ignores all the sonic advances of the modern century and reinstates
faith in live musicianship over computer programming. Not that the musicianship
is stunningly great or anything: all these Nashville cats that Candi brought
over to London are good, but generally sound as if they were just working by
the hour — and yet, even without exuberance and excitement, it is still a
pleasure to hear this sound in 2009.
Candi herself has audibly aged, sounding
huskier and duskier than she used to, but there is still plenty of soul and
conviction in her voice — well evident already on the opening number, the slow
soul waltz ʽBreaking Down Slowʼ that points you in the main direction this
music is going to take, that of the Tensely Aching Heart. Funky R&B grooves
begin to arrive with the title track (cool weaving textures between two
well-synchronized guitars and a well-mechanized brass section) and ʽI Feel The
Sameʼ (funk-blues in the style of the dear departed Albert King), but the focus
always resides on the singer, which is both a blessing and a curse: she's good,
but not that good, and sometimes I
quietly wish that the backing musicians had been given a more open chance to
shine — there's hardly a single guitar solo anywhere on the album.
The overall reaction is a little mixed, because
the main vibe seems confused: on one hand, the album relies a lot on personal
tragedy and depressed nostalgia ("I've only just lost the best years of my
life", she sings in a genuinely moving manner on ʽDust On My Pillowʼ),
yet, on the other hand, this seems just like the kind of record she'd secretly
dreamed of making ever since the early hits — one of those «I finally get to do
things my way and my way only»
moments of triumph, where the artist is clearly elevated by just the mere
understanding that she is no longer being exploited by anyone and no longer has
to conform to any particular fashion. These two emotions sometimes cancel out
each other, confusedly disallowing for a proper sharpening of the feelings; but
ultimately, it still comes together with a few nice personal anthems of
contentment — ʽI Don't Want For Anythingʼ and ʽThe Light In Your Eyesʼ mix
together her secular and gospel experience in subtle ways that make these
numbers, clichéd as they are, relatable; the way she delivers that final piece
of advice, "don't ever lose the light in your eyes", is quite
endearing.
I give the record a thumbs up for totally irrational
reasons — had all these songs been recorded by, say, Bonnie Raitt, I'd probably
pass them by completely, but somehow Candi just has this hard-to-explain
charisma that makes them all seem deeper than they probably really are. Roughly
speaking, she seems to believe in this stuff, and she seems willing to inject
her personal experience in it, and so, even in the absence of solid, original
hooks, when you have a backing band with such a good sound, and a front singer
with such a great heart, well, how would it be possible not to recommend this?
And I haven't even thrown in the obligatory «hey, at least it's better than all
that Rihanna crap» retort yet...
No comments:
Post a Comment