Daniel_Rf's Full Review: The Soul Sessions by Joss Stone
Not a review of the entire album, but rather a review of its lead-off single, which epinions does not list.
That guitar riff is pure Blues, and in a more sparse environment, it could possibly be cool and haunting as all Hell. But with the rest of the song being so MOR, it ends up reminding me more of Eric Clapton or (brrrr!) Johnny Lang than Freddie King. It brings with itself the taste of such a cheap signifier, and that’s basically what’s wrong with the song as a whole, too – it is one big signifier, supposed to evoke “Blues” and “Jazz” and “Soul” without developing anything around this. This aura of ill-defined middle age standards of cool (and I’m not being aegist here, nor even rockist – every generation has its own share of ill-digested codes, and what I hate about it isn’t its lack of authenticity, it’s the fact that it’s neither traditional nor innovative, or rather, it is in a tradition, but a tradition that got things very very wrong) permeates the entire record and (sorry to be stereotypical here) gives you the distinct feeling that you’re at the house of someone who owns a lot of Moloko and Paul Weller CDs (except that both Moloko and Paul Weller, say what you will about them, at one point in their lives had their own sound).
A lot of the fault for this clearly resides with the (synthesized?) wah-wah bass, which adds a feeling of flatulence to the record: its sumptuousness destroys the attempt at sharpness and cool that the other instruments are engaging in. In fact, you barely notice how deadly the riff could be in a different context the first few times, because that bouncy, bloated bass sterilizes it. Due to its omnipresence, the instrument sets the mood for the entire record, almost as much as Stone does.
Speaking of which: Stone’s delivery is quite clearly the only thing on here that makes putting this on a Blue Eyed Soul compilation the least bit plausible. Thing is, even that is as much Jazz as it is Soul: she ad libs and stretches her lines like a R&B singer, but at the same time tries to reach the coldness and composure of a Jazz lounge singer – at one point she even approaches scating! Of course, she lacks a good setting for either style to work, but great singers have always managed to surpass this: what destroys her effort is how every line of the song makes one suspect that what she’s aiming for isn’t true mastery of either style, or indeed some sort of synthesis, but rather a signifier of her own, even if she doesn’t know this. You’d be hard pressed to find identifiable marks of Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin’s style in her singing; what you do find however, is the tough as leather diva style that both of them are in some part responsible for creating and that legions have followed (Mariah, Whitney, all the way down to Anastacia, probably the bottom of the barrel). It’s possible that some of this comes naturally: maybe her voice really is that husky all the time, and maybe she does come from a region where people say “beaTAING” and “peepAING” but not all of it can be put down to coincidence, not every inflection can be an accident. “Fell In Love With A Boy” transmits arrogance, aloofness, an air of royalty: traits that are less than likeable in a young performer releasing her debut single. PUNK ROCK, you might say. But punks had something of their own, which is what justified them: this song is arrogance coming from the status quo and not against it.
It’s not a totally worthless record: Stone does show a good range here and there, some good lines that were lost in Jack White’s screamfest on the original version get a chance to shine (“roll for the flavor” – a curiously Hip-Hopish line considering Grampa White’s highly ignorant and offensive stance on the genre) and the “don’t go telling no more lies” ending is a nice touch (bringing the song to 3:38, which is more than what your average singer had to prove themselves on their debut single, so that whole “it’s such a short song, how do you expect her to show her talent??” argument doesn’t work, either), but overall this song is unremarkable in just about every single way that it could be, gently reminding one of some of the worst pitfalls around on the popular music scene without becoming hateful enough to epitomize them. So why have I spent so much time thinking about it, then? Well, because you people keep buying it, and as a consequence I have to put up with it coming on MTV every five minutes, and have my roommate state that it ain’t that bad. Well, it is.
Playing up the old-school R&B flavor in her music, 16-year-old, Joss Stone was whisked to the States to record with Betty Wright, which resulted in Th...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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