The Soul of John Black, “Good Thang” (Yellow Dog)
On his new album, John A. Bigham — he’s the Soul of John Black — shows again that he deserves the kind of recognition gained by other soul artists with a retro bent, from Raphael Saadiq to Sharon Jones. This 10-song set is, indeed, a “good thang.”
The singer and guitarist, once a member of the highly energetic and entertaining Fishbone, pretty much covers all the bases here. On one hand, he’s as smooth as they come: “How Can I” is a bedroom ballad with a sleek ’70s vibe, and “Lil’ Mama’s in the Kitchen” exudes the suave charm of Brook Benton. On the other hand, he can get sweaty: The title song and “I Love It” are punchy slabs of R&B with a sure pop touch.
Overall, Bigham proves adept at blending the urbane and the down-home. “New York to L.A.,” for one, has a late-night ambience and falsetto vocals that say street, but Bigham punctuates the song with a pungent acoustic-guitar solo that’s right out of the back roads. And it works. Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer
Brian Eno, “Drums Between the Bells” Deluxe edition (Warp)
For his second album in 12 months, pop’s ultimate experimentalist, Brian Eno, toys with something rare within his catalog: poetry. Texts have specked his work since the beginning of his solo career, but Eno mostly has shied away from words as roadblocks to his walls of sound.
Here, with the collaboration of impressionistic poet Rick Holland and a handful of (mostly female) singer-speakers whose voices remain either dryly unadulterated or get weirdly morphed, Eno throws sound and visions around like a salad spinner. As the readers rant quietly about urban spaces and the sciences, Eno provides frisky ambient music, a form of word jazz that dabbles somnolently in chamber classicism, Exotica, and Krautrock as the texts move from background to foreground and back again. “The Real” grows more hypnotic through its repetitions of noise, vocals, and ideas (“real runs out and seems to see the real as it runs”). Eno, too, finds his own brand of seduction while speak-singing “Breath of Crows,” as Holland’s words embrace a god that “grows and shrinks with nature’s wish.” Eno ain’t Barry White, but he’s shockingly close. A gorgeous and daring work, even by Eno standards. A.D. Amorosi, Phildelphia Inquirer
