(Tamla)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
The line on this highly idiosyncratic follow-up to Let's Get It On now is that it's the most influential Marvin Gaye record, and in the wake of crossover appeals by the likes of Miguel and Frank Ocean I'm begrudgingly starting to agree. Begrudgingly because Here My Dear is the masterpiece and it still has yet to really get its due, but I Want You remains an intriguing bridge of the gap between the grinding loverboy anthems of Let's Get It On and the carefully constructed, insular navel-gazing of Here. It also soars expansively as a single unit and resists being pulled apart into individual songs, which is frequently the mark of a truly great LP -- a distinction I'd stop short of, if only because I think this is the least compelling Gaye record of the '70s in songwriting terms.
Not in any other sense, however. I Want You is not, as was bizarrely and dismissively proclaimed at the time, a disco record. (Nor should "disco record" have ever been an automatic negative criticism, but I digress.) Its big conceit is that it's aimed squarely at the now largely forgotten but highly prescient Quiet Storm radio format, kind of a precursor to the dredged-into-groove slow jam R&B that bloggers sometimes label "progressive." This is music that's completely weird but in a thoroughly ingratiating, immediately appealing sense. It's a singular experience -- variations on a theme delving further and further into itself, a cohesive and erotic near-dirge that blends together as if one song with various movements.
The first movement is inevitably the most remembered, if largely because it was a #1 hit in the U.S. The title cut is an effective introduction to the album's lopsided, lush mixing and production, a smooth celebration of Wall of Sound sex into which Gaye buries himself. His vocals are wholly different than anything in his prior catalog, even if his gorgeous self-backing and self-harmonizing make him unmistakable. Throughout the record, he never once deliberately lifts himself above the din of orchestral and choral and pounding ambiance, rather doing his best to become completely a part of it. Run back to, say, "Come Get to This" and you sense both what's unusual about I Want You and the reason for its controversy: it never offers such a satisfying moment of balls-out catharsis, no belted-out vocal melody. The opener itself doesn't even come across as having separate hooks, choruses, etc., even though it does; it feels like just a calmly compressed ball of sensual energy. Many mistook this for robotic apathy. In the post-shoegaze, post-ambient era, it's easier to understand what intrigued Gaye about the vagueness of this music. Audiences, for their part, responded in kind without delay; the single and album were both major successes, if not quite on the previous scale.
Gaye's seductively casual vocal performances, initially jarring, quickly become enough of an asset that hearing killer-smooth "After the Dance" first without them and then at the encore with his input is like a climactic embrace. God bless him for never once neglecting his natural doo wop inflections, for finding a way to infuse desperation into even towers of detached soul and jazz-funk like "Feel All My Love Inside," "Soon I'll Be Loving You Again," and "Since I Had You" (even the titles run suggestively together). Even if the record can't stand fully up to its two gigantic predecessors, hey, all the explicit orgasmic sex is more aesthetically direct and centric upon female pleasure than on Get It On, which is some progress, and the filler is far better than on What's Going On, as though he's learned to even goof off beautifully.
The sense of cumulative power in the album as a whole is inescapable. You keep expecting the tension to break with some full-on "Mercy Mercy Me" or "You Sure Love to Ball" juggernaut but it ever does, just keeps brewing and stewing and tweaking itself. I nominate one moment, though, as being clearly a fixture and creation apart from the rest. "Come Live with Me Angel" is the one I Want You cut that probably belongs in the pantheon of introductory Gaye; the chorally driven groove laid down by his wall of singing props up an intimate and sensual refrain, the strongest and most irresistibly offbeat of the record. But even this has the feel of being tossed off, so evocative of its era and its own sort of sweetness, and hence it's the exception that proves the rule. If you came to Gaye via a best-of or a What's Going On and you're expecting those sorts of pleasure, this song might be key to understanding the more specific appeal and brilliance of I Want You. Once you drop your baggage, lay the needle down, and delve completely into the LP, preferably with a nearby sympathetic lover, nothing has to make sense except the filling of your ears with this masterly beauty. And how wonderful that Gaye's work is still revealing itself, layers peeling away and influence ever reassured, after so many decades.
[SEE ALSO:]
What's Going On (1971)
Let's Get It On (1973)
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