It’s telling that this group was formed by music students at Indiana University: there is something slightly scholarly about their immaculate vision of American soul. Their garage-production 2016 debut was diverting, but the songwriting wasn’t quite strong or original enough to stop it feeling like a school project to simulate 1960s Stax pop. But for their second, the arrangements are both fleshed and spaced out, with strings, brass and backing vocals all made quietly sumptuous, and the songwriting reaches classic status.
It’s still totally retro, to the point where there are even little soul-buff Easter eggs hidden: the guitar solo on stoic state-of-the-nation opener Morning in America uses the same cosmic sound as Ernie Isley did on That Lady, while closer True Love uses the same three guitar notes that open William Bell’s classic apologia I Forgot to Be Your Lover. The warm, grainy production calls to mind Barbara Mason’s chamber-soul masterpieces. But the band are now a gleaming, mint-condition Cadillac rather than a beat-up Oldsmobile.
There simply isn’t a weak or even middling track, and the strongest can go toe to toe with the best of Al Green or Bobby Womack. These include Listen to Your Heart, on which lead singer Jones observes someone’s yearning over a crisply attentive breakbeat; the backing vocals, urging the person to requite their love, are like a beautiful inner monologue. How Can I Be Sure might have a bit of a muddled lyric, halfway between social commentary and yet more heartbreak, but when it switches up from one spectacular mid-tempo ballad, anchored like others here by drummer Aaron Frazer’s exquisite falsetto, into another that’s even more spectacular, the title line becomes universal. Too Many Tears and Sea Gets Hotter are sophisticated lounge-pop for dinnertime at a hip debutante ball in 1962; Walk Away is the kind of song James Brown would sing to win someone back, successfully.
Perhaps we shouldn’t think of them in terms of contemporary or retro at all: though it was created in the mid-20th century, Jones and co suggest this music can be sustained for eternity.
