Album Reviews

Think about it: Aretha Franklin, John Hammond and Jerry Wexler —three giants of music— all converge in one story. But do the facts support the legend? This album certainly gives pause.

I can’t get enough of these Candid reissues from Pure Pleasure. The original label was short-lived and the distribution limited. Candid was originally a subsidiary of Archie Bleyer’s Cadence Records (Bleyer had an unlikely ‘50’s hit single with “Hernando’s Hideaway” from the Broadway hit “Damn Yankees” and scored big with The Everly Brothers). The label was sold to pop crooner Andy Williams, a seemingly unlikely customer, who reissued some of both Cadence and Candid titles on his label Barnaby, distributed by Columbia Records.

In 1989 digital was all the rage. New vinyl records were on the verge of extinction. And Kate Bush remained silent - four years after her chart-topping album Hounds Of Love. Her famously loyal fans were literally chomping at the bit for the next release from the mystical chanteuse. The Sensual World was just around the corner. Would it be brilliant or bizarre?

This is a weird, squooshy, watery record. The music is soft and squooshy, the lyrics are soft and squooshy. Songwriter Art Halperin’s voice is particularly squooshy, the background musicians play softly and squooshily, and even the veteran recording and mastering engineer Barry Diament has captured it squooshily in real stereo in a pleasingly reverberant church using a pair of carefully placed microphones.