Skip to main content

October London-Color Blind Love

Eleven tracks from a singer whose voice invites an obvious comparison, and who has built an entire career on being brave enough to invite it.

October London Artist Profile - Singersroom.com R&B Singers

October London

October London has one of the most immediately identifiable voices in contemporary soul, for a reason that is both his greatest asset and his biggest problem: he sounds startlingly like Marvin Gaye.

Rather than run from that, he has leaned into it. He signed to Death Row Records after Snoop Dogg acquired the label, and released an album titled The Rebirth of Marvin, which is about as direct as an artistic statement gets. The reception has been mixed — members of Gaye's family have expressed complicated feelings about it — and the argument about whether homage of that directness is legitimate is a real one.

What is not in dispute is the singing. The falsetto control, the layered backing arrangements and the phrasing are all genuinely accomplished, and the songwriting on this earlier set is better than the tribute framing suggests.

What to listen for

"Color Blind" is the title track and the best introduction — a slow, multi-tracked vocal arrangement that shows what he can build out of his own voice.

"Black Man in America" opens the set and is the most serious thing here, a direct descendant of What's Going On in subject as well as sound.

"Where's the Justice" is its companion piece and the more angry of the two.

"Quiet Storm" is a knowing title and a well-made record, and "My Sweet Love" is the most romantic thing on the list.

"Bring Me Up" with Faith Evans is the best collaboration, and having a singer of her standing on the record is a meaningful endorsement.

"Slow Dance" and "Love in the Summer" are the deep cuts, and "Shoulder to Lean On" is the most straightforwardly gospel-inflected.

Go deeper

Color Blind Love is the earlier project and the one where he sounds most like himself rather than like his influence.

Then go to the source: Marvin Gaye's I Want You (1976) is the album this singing most closely descends from, and Here, My Dear (1978) is the one everyone should hear and almost nobody does.

Listening note: listen past the resemblance and the arrangements are where the real skill sits. The backing vocals are stacked four and five deep, all sung by him, and the interplay between those layers is doing most of the emotional work. It is a technique learned from the influence rather than an imitation of it.

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