Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 28/04/08
Label: Warp

It's probably a good idea to be a boy right now - the backlash against girls being, ooh, about 30 seconds away. And it's definitely a good idea to artwork an old-school soul album as though it were cutting-edge techno - soul being a little bit 2007. No sepia-tinted images of our crooner smooching a vintage Shure microphone and wearing giant headphones. No cigarette smoke. No faux Blue Note sleeve layouts. Just a speccy bloke in a 'directional' top surrounded by shards of laser beam. And it's on Warp - not too many Beverley Knight fans there, we suspect.

So far so canny, then, for Cambridgeshire-bred Berlin resident and one-time hardcore glitch geek Jamie Lidell with his follow-up to 2005's widely-admired "Multiply". Where that album blended Motowny R&B with modern electronic elements, "Jim" seems to have ditched anything that was invented after 1972. Stax-inspired goodness through and through, "Jim" begins with the Stevie Wonder-ish "Another Day", all boogie-woogie piano, synchronized tambourine and handclaps, birdsong and pootling woodwind middle eight in which to straighten your oversize shirt collars and order another Southern Comfort.

The irresistible "Out Of My System" is real ants-in-pants stuff: conjuring visions of James Brown falling righteously to his knees in a priapic trance. Perfectly paced ballad "All I Wanna Do" is pure Otis Redding. Gently plucked guitar widdles over brushed snail-paced drums, a gospel chorus, and lyrics worthy of something saved in a Brill Building desk drawer for Elvis: "If I could swallow the sky and all the mountains too / I'd do it, so there'd be nothing to fall on you". Only listeners on a very severe caffeine high will not swoon at this point. "A Little Bit Of Feelgood", which works a funkalicious "Sesame Street", afros-and-flares vibe, with the help of finger cymbals and one nicely-placed "yeow", is another highlight.

Play that funky music white boy, one is forced to conclude. And so it goes for a tidy ten tracks, all topped by a voice of gently boiling caramel - a style that channels the best aural qualities of Terence Trent D'Arby and Ray LaMontagne while side-stepping their cloying overearnestness. Boundlessly cheerful, unequivocally likeable - despite the fleeting, rapidly dismissed worry this is some post-modern joke - Jamie Lidell deserves at least as much fuss as Duffy got. Will all this - the presentation, the label rep, the pizzazz - be enough to succeed sales-wise where the likes of fellow soul revivalists Tyler James and Jason Mraz have failed? Let's hope so.

    by Anna Britten