LADY BLACKBIRD
Slang Spirituals (Foundation/BMG)
AT THE TIME OF HER debut album as Lady Blackbird, 2021’s masterful, moving and quite wonderful Black Acid Soul, Marley Munroe had been around for a decade or more, and sounded like it. In the best possible way.
While relatively modern R&B could be detected throughout, this was jazz-derived torch song and early soul intimacy entwined, with a grain in the voice and attitude that made it clear this was not a talented ingénue discovering an old musical style as some algorithmic quirk but someone with, as we like to say now, lived experience. With cowriter/producer Chris Seefried, her version of Tim Hardin’s It’ll Never Happen Again and the Bill Evans-referencing keyboards of Deron Johnson, her evocation of Roberta Flack’s fluidity and a clear line to Nina Simone, acoustic bass and minimal arrangements, anchored everything in older traditions.
It was an album that demanded to exist on vinyl and be played without distraction, at home if you couldn’t be in a smoky back bar, and accompanied by something to sip while pondering big and small things. Fair to say, I was a big fan.
Between 2021 and this second album, Munroe has been heavily involved in collaborations that leaned harder into R&B and electronic-based dance music (most of it very good, though not all necessarily essential), making tracks far more big room than living room. So it probably doesn’t surprise that Slang Spirituals begins with a punchy, fuller-sounding, even danceable approach.
Let Not (Your Heart Be Troubled) packs almost a choir of backing voices, brass-pushing the energy, and a touch of a late ‘60s Bond theme; the groove-conscious Like A Woman finds that Bond reference even more relevant as Munroe ups the Shirley Bassey power amid Mike Garson-like piano and urgent orchestration; and Reborn is beehive and tight skirt soul, with handclaps and wah-wah guitar offering the combination of all this momentum.
It is not until track four, Man On A Boat, with upright bass and acoustic guitar locked in a swaying folk/soul rhythm, and the lightest brushstrokes of backing voices and piano, that more air is allowed in. We’re back in the small room, close and personal.
But then Munroe and Seefried throw a curveball that hangs between old and new, completely reimagining Thom Bell and Phil Hurrt’s When The Game Is Played On You (the only cover on the album) from the stomping Temptations-like mover of Bettye Swann’s 1974 version to a moody, snaking, psych-soul atmosphere that smokes for more than three minutes before she properly enters, and then stays at smouldering and slightly resentful for a further four minutes.
From that point on, the tendency is to rhythm and blues more than jazz, but less stridently than the opening trio, even if If I Told You is a little more in your face with sharp slaps and bottom hand-heavy piano making glam soul – think Elton John drafting in Gladys Knight.
Matter Of Time channels some more of that early ‘70s groove but more at the Marvin Gaye end of things, No One Can Love Me (Like You Do) is a drop to the knees ballad; The City taps deeper into Roberta Flack’s intensity over a northern soul feet-mover that gets sonically richer as it goes along; and Sunday We’ll Be Free is a reminder that folk has trace roots in her past – see Tim Hardin – with a spectral structure and brutally simple delivery that haunts.
This album hasn’t had the revelatory feel for me of Black Acid Soul, and I’m still of the belief that in a world not short of variations on soul there could and should be encouragement for people taking alternative routes that understand its roots. But that’s not to say Slang Spirituals isn’t regularly very satisfying, revealing more shades of a genuinely interesting performer.
For example, closing the record with Whatever His Name – even longer than When The Game Is Played On You, at eight minutes-plus – is a bold way to wrap ancient synth sounds and flute, the earthy gutsiness of her singing and a gospel subtext, an expansive, hypnotic mood that veers into prog and a torched urban soul, while not ever letting go the grip Munroe has had on us.
Maybe the best summation comes in the thought that while I will almost certainly get this on vinyl, I could happily live with it on CD, and play it on the road or in company.
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