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Classic Recordings: In Effect Mode by Al B. Sure

Nine tracks from a 1988 debut that helped invent a sound and made its teenage maker one of the defining voices of new jack swing.

 

Al B. Sure!: In Effect Mode (1988)

Al B. Sure! arrived at nineteen with an unusual combination: a light, breathy tenor that sounded almost fragile, set against production that was among the hardest in R&B at the time. In Effect Mode was the result, and it was one of the records that established what came to be called new jack swing.

The production, largely with Kyle West, is the key. Where earlier R&B had smoothed its drums, this record leaves them exposed and swung — hip-hop rhythm under a singer who was doing something closer to Smokey Robinson than to anything contemporary.

The album was enormous, won him the Soul Train Best New Artist award, and he went on to write and produce for others while remaining, oddly, a somewhat underrated figure in the history of the genre.

What to listen for

"Nite and Day" is the record, and it is one of the best-constructed R&B singles of the eighties — a bassline, a swung drum pattern, and a vocal that floats above both without ever pushing.

"Off on Your Own (Girl)" is the second single and the most emotionally direct thing on the album.

"Rescue Me" is where the production is hardest, and "If I'm Not Your Lover" is where the singing is most exposed.

"Killing Me Softly" is the cover, and taking on the Roberta Flack record at nineteen is either brave or reckless; he gets through it by not attempting her restraint.

"Naturally Mine" is the slow jam that has outlived the hits on the quiet-storm format, and "Oooh This Love Is So" is the deep cut.

"Noche Y Día" is the Spanish-language version, which was an unusual thing for an American R&B album to include in 1988.

Go deeper

For the new jack swing story, Teddy Riley is the central figure — his work with Guy, Keith Sweat and Bobby Brown is the rest of this record's world, and all of it is elsewhere on this blog.

Al B. Sure! also appears on Quincy Jones's Back on the Block as part of the "The Secret Garden" quartet with Barry White, James Ingram and El DeBarge, which is worth hearing as a summary of where male R&B singing stood at the end of the eighties.

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