Slow Train Soul –
Illegal Cargo (CD)
Sound: B Music:
B
What is soul today?
The old R&B was sanded-down by the major record labels with the
Disco era, then as R&B tried to make a comeback, Rap & Hip-Hop replaced
any possibility of that. Electronica
and DJ mixing sort of brought back some of Disco’s better and more upbeat
ideas, albeit with more realism. Illegal
Cargo is an album by Slow Train Soul that mixes the latter with a touch of
the Anita Baker/Sade school of Jazz/R&B vocalizing from the female half of
the duo, Lady Z.
She sounds initially like the kind of too often anonymous
singer radio stations seem to be banning for tired female vocalists and
played-out-on-arrival Hip-Hop that narrowcasting has prevented from happening
so we cannot have any good music. Lady
Z is more Jazzy than many of her contemporaries and also happens to play guitar
and percussion. The male half of the
duo is Morten Varano, a keyboardist who also has one of the most recent music
making designations you are likely to find on an music album: programmer.
Yes, times have changed and post-modernism has more than
set into music. However, the duo may be
expanding the idea of what programming for music is, aside from the fact that
it is also the idea of producing and engineering spilling into the
performance. Andy Warhol would have
appreciated that and likely predicted it just the same. The music is more consistent and interesting
than in many albums we have heard recently.
The tracks include:
1) Illegal
Cargo
2) Slow
Train
3) In The
Black Night
4) Tell Me
Somethin’
5) Betty’s
Revenge
6) Naturally
7) Stoned
Rays
8) Inna
City Woman
9) Twisted
Cupid
10) Intuition
11) Trail Of Dawn
12) Illegal Cargo (reprise)
They each have the feel of the world of the dance floor,
but stay street enough, even evoking some snippets of funk. This was a pleasant surprise overall and I
look forward to hearing more from them and learning more about them. With this kind of talent, they ought to have
a breakout in the U.S. sooner or later.
The PCM 2.0 Stereo is also nice and clear, for a
16Bit/44.1KHz playback format. I
wondered as I was listening how this would sound in DVD-Audio or SACD, but I
bet some vinyl of this has also been pressed, especially considering Tommy Boy
Records issued this on behalf of Murena Records. If you are not familiar with the genres this album represents,
then Slow Train Soul – Illegal Cargo is a good title to start with. We recently listened to the similar but more
electronic LTJ Bukem Planet Earth compilation and some of these tracks
would have been at home there. For more
information, go to www.slowtrainsoul.com
or www.murenarecords.com to learn
about the duo and their latest activities.
- Nicholas Sheffo
