Skip to main content

Stylistics VibeZ

Seventeen tracks from the sweetest-sounding group Philadelphia produced — and a lesson in how much sophistication can hide inside a love song.

C1si+MsUxcS._SL1000_

The Stylistics

The Stylistics were built around Russell Thompkins Jr., whose extraordinarily high, pure falsetto is one of the most identifiable sounds in soul music. What made the group great, though, was the partnership with the producer and arranger Thom Bell.

Bell, working with the lyricist Linda Creed, wrote them a run of songs that are considerably more complex than their surfaces suggest. The chord movement is jazz-derived, the orchestrations use French horn, oboe and harpsichord — instruments soul records did not use — and the arrangements are meticulous.

The result is music that can be dismissed as sentimental on a casual listen and reveals itself as some of the most carefully constructed popular music of the seventies on a closer one.

What to listen for

"You Make Me Feel Brand New" is the group's masterpiece — a duet between Thompkins and the baritone Airrion Love, and one of the great vocal arrangements in soul.

"Betcha by Golly, Wow" and "You Are Everything" are the two most covered songs in the catalogue, and both were written by Bell and Creed.

"People Make the World Go Round" appears twice here and is the outlier — a bleak, socially conscious record about pollution, strikes and urban decay, wrapped in the prettiest arrangement on the album.

"I'm Stone in Love with You" is the best pure pop song, and "Break up to Make Up" is the most emotionally complicated.

"Children of the Night" is the deep cut that turns up on serious soul playlists, and "Hurry Up This Way Again" is the late-period record that Philadelphia collectors prize.

"Stop, Look, Listen To Your Heart" is the one Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye later covered.

Go deeper

The Stylistics (1971) and Round 2 (1972) are the two Thom Bell albums, and they are the essential ones.

Thom Bell's wider catalogue — The Delfonics, The Spinners — is one of the great bodies of arranging in popular music. Linda Creed, who also wrote "The Greatest Love of All", died of cancer at thirty-seven and deserves to be far better known.

Listening note: the arrangements use French horn, oboe and harpsichord — instruments soul records did not touch — and the chord movement is closer to jazz than to pop. On a casual listen it reads as sweetness; on a close one it is some of the most carefully constructed popular music of the decade.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more