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Classic Recordings: House of Music – Tony! Toni! Tone!

The album that closed out the greatest R&B band of its generation, made by three people who were barely speaking. Eleven tracks, and not a wasted second.

House of Music, 1996

Tony! Toni! Toné! — brothers Raphael Saadiq and D'wayne Wiggins with cousin Timothy Christian Riley — came out of Oakland and spent the early 1990s doing something almost nobody else in R&B was doing: playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, and treating the album as the unit of work.

House of Music was their fourth and final album, released in 1996 amid the tensions that would break the group up shortly afterward. It is also comfortably their best — a record that moves between gospel, funk, doo-wop, hip-hop and straight soul without ever sounding like a genre exercise, because the band could actually play all of it.

Its influence is out of proportion to its sales. A great deal of what neo-soul became was worked out here first.

What to listen for

"Let's Get Down" with DJ Quik opens the record and is the most immediate thing on it — a West Coast summit that still sounds effortless.

"Thinking Of You" is the single most people know, and its bassline is the best single argument for Saadiq as a musician rather than a frontman.

"Lovin' You" and "Don't Fall In Love" are the ballads, and both are sung with a lightness that a lot of 1990s R&B had abandoned in favour of vocal athletics.

"Still A Man" is the album's emotional centre — a song about dignity and failure that very few R&B records of any era attempt.

"Tossin' & Turnin'" and "Holy Smokes & Gee Whiz" are where the doo-wop and gospel roots show most clearly, and "Wild Child" is the funkiest thing here.

Throughout, listen to how the record is played rather than programmed. The drums breathe, the bass moves, and nothing is quantised into place. That is the whole point of the band.

Go deeper

Sons of Soul (1993) is the other essential Tonys album and by some accounts the better one.

Raphael Saadiq's solo catalogue follows directly — Instant Vintage, The Way I See It, Stone Rollin', Jimmy Lee — and his production work shaped D'Angelo, Solange, Bilal and a great deal else.

For the Bay Area context: En Vogue, Club Nouveau and later Goapele all come from the same scene, and the region's R&B tradition is distinct from both New York's and Atlanta's in ways that are rarely discussed.

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