Aloe Blacc Lift Your Spirit (XIX Recordings / Interscope Records) ⋆⋆⋆
Dance and soul are music’s odd couple. Though they’re aesthetically polar opposites, artists from both worlds are increasingly relying on each other to push their respective genres: for dance producers, R&B and soul singers have become more useful than rappers in allowing their blaring beats to reach a wider audience. In return, soul singers have used the exposure of crossover tracks to rekindle slept-on careers.
Aloe Blacc is the latest urban artist to benefit from such a relationship.
Known as the voice of last year’s Avicii anthem Wake Me Up, the track’s success paved the way for the California soul-man to release his second album on a major label to an expectant crowd.
Always lyrically transparent, Blacc says success has changed him. In the triumphant, horn-laced The Man, the 35-year-old hints on his new-found fame: “Girl you can tell everybody / I’m the man, I’m the man, I’m the man.”
But Lift Your Spirit is not all basking in success. It’s a solid album that showcases Blacc’s smooth-as-butter voice, though it lacks some of the grit that made his 2010 debut Good Things a winner. A lion’s share of the production – eight of the 11 tracks – are helmed by the producer DJ Khalil, who gives the tracks extra polish.
Soldier in the City has a fun disco-funk swagger; by the end you can’t help but sing along to Blacc’s “Left, right, left” refrain.
The buoyant title track is also a standout, with Blacc toasting the good times over a vintage guitar groove recalling The Jackson 5.
These offerings succeed because Blacc moves away from his brief to inspire; he simply sings. When he doesn’t, we get misses such as the sappy Here Today and the lacklustre Wanna Be With You. The former’s painstaking ambition to be a massive crowd singalong just makes it sound too turgid. Wanna Be With You recalls Pharrell’s Happy in that it wants to burrow into your mind through pure chorus repetition – a risky all-or-nothing gamble that fails as the track grates.
Lift Your Spirit evens itself out towards the end with Can You Do This. With a muscular funk backdrop recalling the Dap-Kings, Blacc really tears into this one. It beckons to be future radio hit.
Ticking Bomb is also an unexpected treat, its lyrical imagery supported by a cinematic production incorporating marching flamenco guitars and an increasingly pounding beat.
It is enough to suggest that the best is yet to come from the talented artist.
