Review: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – I Learned the Hard Way

The Daptone record label has made a name for itself by reproducing the sound of late sixties and early seventies Motown recordings with uncanny accuracy.  Their headlining act, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, released their fourth album, “I Learned the Hard Way,” earlier this year.  The album is as retro as anything you’ll find.  It was recorded live in the studio on old analog equipment, its hook-laden instrumentation drips with strings and horns, and backup vocalists regularly call back in two-part harmony.

Sharon Jones’s singing on this album is emotive and raw, and keeps me coming back to this album.  Almost every song on this album is about heartbreak of one stripe or another, and Jones sings this material so convincingly that the album is almost gut-punchingly painful to listen to in places.  Whether she is singing about being cheated on by her man in the album’s title track or about life as a neglected child in “She Ain’t a Child No More,” she sings so passionately that you cannot escape the sensation that she has lived whatever she’s singing about.  Some songs she opens with a conversational patter that recalls James Brown, except that her patter is also unflinchingly honest.  When she says that she learned the hard way, this is borne out by her performance on song after song about messy relationships and bad breakups.  That she has married such an authentic sounding delivery with a level of virtuosity that recalls soul greats like Aretha Franklin is a real testament to her ability as a singer and an entertainer.

While most members of the band contributed material to this album, bassist Bosco Mann, who is also the manager of the Daptone label, provided the lion’s share.  Unfortunately, the songwriting is not as clear and concise as most of the old Motown singles they are inspired by, so the songs on this album tend to meander a bit.  At its best, the material on this album reminds me more of later, longer songs like “Ball of Confusion.”  While Jones’s delivery and the musicianship of the Dap-Kings carry whatever they perform, I would love to hear the group tackle something more like what the songwriters in the Brill building were putting out in the sixties.  In the better-written songs, like the closing doo-wop number “Mama Don’t Like My Man,” the group is dizzyingly good, and I would love to hear the band tackle better material more often.  I’m not saying these songs are as uninspired as, say, Usher’s “OMG”.  They’re just not at the level of “Respect.”

You can click here to download the title track for free at the band’s website.

Soul Vaccination

As Sasha Frere-Jones points out nicely in the latest New Yorker, there’s something of a soul revival going on.  Frere-Jones has a hard time taking it seriously. Like a lot of people, he really values music that breaks new ground, so any revisitation of older styles strikes him more as gratuitous fandom than legitimate musical expression.  There is a certain validity to that argument: people remember the Bachs, the Beethovens, and The Beatles because they created new modes of musical expression.  Their music holds the imagination precisely because it was so new and so revolutionary.

All that being said, the claim that backward-looking music is of lesser value rings false to me.  We remember Beethoven because his music is still played in concert halls, and The Beatles still top the charts on Last.fm.  Beethoven also idolized Bach, from a century earlier.  Even the Beatles’ White Album featured songs like “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie“, which were as retro as “Revolution 9” was avant-garde.

There have been many revivals of different types of music, and many good bands have emerged from them over the years.  The garage rock revival spawned bands like The White Stripes and The Hives, while the swing revival launched the careers of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.  These bands all started looking backward, but have since developed their own unique sounds.  In some ways, they are more revolutionary for drawing their sound from a different source than what is popular at the time.  The songs of Motor City are some of the most memorable and most tuneful in the history of American popular music.  A return to that style of sound could prove to be a shot in the arm for the ailing music industry.  Frere-Jones admits in his article that he was perhaps too hasty in dismissing the work of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.  For my part, I’ll be keeping my eyes, as well as my ears, on the soul revival.

Here are a few videos to put this sound in your ears.  Notice that their visual language is as retro as their sound.

This second video, as you can probably tell from the title, is a bit … blue.  Mind your speakers if there are sensitive ears about.