Pharrell Williams appears as producer on the slick groove and backing-vocal heavy retro-soul jam Love Is The Answer.
It seems to pick up by track 3 with the slinky funk march of Soldier In The City before 2014’s musical King Midas aka. Like a lot of pop albums, the singles on Lift Your Spirit are placed front and center at the beginning and the rest of the album provides a bit more room for lateral movement. Loose beats and triumphant brass underscore the “You can tell everybody” hook lifted directly from Elton John’s Your Song on second single The Man but as a chorus, it doesn’t really hit as hard as it should and despite a gospel choir for the last chorus, the energy only really gets to about 7 throughout. There are rich strings and handclaps but the overall country vibe is kind of unsettling and honestly, not a great start. You wouldn’t imagine these three people in a room together coming up with something that sounds like a Mumford and Sons offcut, but somehow that’s exactly what has happened. First track Wake Me Up was released back in September 2013 and features co-writing from EDM superstar Avicii and a surprising appearance by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. There’s a definite sheen to this record that was present on his 2006 debut Shine Through and this seems like a strange move since it was the raw, Stax-influenced immediacy of 2010’s Good Things that brought Blacc to notoriety. It seems like if you had a functioning set of ears in 2010, there’s little chance you didn’t encounter his breakthrough hit I Need a Dollar somewhere in your travels and this month he returns with his third LP Lift Your Spirit – his first with major label Interscope records. Not to be awful but if my name was Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III, I’d probably choose a super-smooth pseudonym like Aloe Blacc under which to release my R&B/Soul music as well.
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