When Amy Winehouse, producer Mark Ronson and others helped kick off a mini Soul music revival in 2007, public interest in old-school soundalikes steadily increased. One of the beneficiaries of this was New York-based Soul outfit Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, who had toiled away for years before finally breaking through in late 2007/early 2008 with their third album, 100 Days, 100 Nights. And although the retro-Soul trend has just about died out, you'd never know it based on SJ & the DKs latest album, I Learned the Hard Way, an unapologetically old school Soul project that dropped in the U.S on April 6, 2010.
Pure, Uncut
While some other artists who've played a part in the old school revival (Amy Winehouse and Raphael Saadiq, to name two) added modern touches to their music to keep things fresh, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are pure, uncut old school Soul. All the instruments are played live, there's no Auto-Tune manipulating the vocals, it all sounds completely organic with minimal studio production wizardry added. This dedication to staying true to the Motown/Stax era of recording music is admirable, but it's also a little boring. Every single one of the album's dozen tracks - from the broken-hearted opening song "That Game Gets Old" to the musically stripped down track "Mama Don't Like My Man" - literally sounds exactly like something that could have been recorded between the late 1950s and mid-to-late 1960s. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; but the band has really painted itself into a corner with this style of music, and there's very little room for creative growth on the path they're taking here.
Paying stylistic homage to classic artists like Otis Redding, Ike & Tina Turner, the Delfonics, etc. is a beautiful thing, but ultimately, I Learned the Hard Way may be too stuck in the past, too wedded to a style of music that reached it's commercial peak more than 40 years ago. There's plenty of good material here - Sharon really cuts loose vocally on "She Ain't No Child No More," "I'll Still Be True" and the fierce financial blues track "Money," - but ultimately, this is an album that's a little too content mimicing the past instead of using the past to build a new future.
