Ida Cox & Coleman Hawkins: Blues for Rampart Street (1961)

(Riverside)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I checked into this record due to the presence of Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, knowing little about Ida Cox's storied career, but while Hawkins' band provides beautifully restrained arrangements, shadowing their swing-period glories, it is she who ended up throttling me. When the LP was recorded, she was nearing her seventies and had been retired for two decades. We're not hearing her sing these mostly self-penned blues classics at her peak, but the wisdom and fire, the frayed edges, make all ten tracks genuinely affecting.

"Blues for Rampart Street" itself is a stirring evocation of bygone years, "Wild Women (Don't Have the Blues)" a monument of teasing eroticism made all the more intriguing by the power in Cox's fading voice. Perhaps best of all is her interpretation of the standard "St. Louis Blues," maybe the most resigned and wounded version I've heard, but there is not even a hint of falseness or strain on this entire disc -- all the songs movingly capture echoes of 1920s and '30s dancehalls and romance and promises running almost tangibly through Cox, the mood sweet but melancholy in the loveliest way.

Ida Cox would never record another album; this short-lived comeback was her last musical project before her death in 1967. It's rare that blues historians get such an unfiltered glimpse at an aged legend, and even rarer that the result is so revealing, ghostly but present. But what makes Blues for Rampart Street truly exceptional is the effortless universal appeal it packs. Dig jazz or blues at all? Pick this up and set forty minutes aside for it; you absolutely will not regret it.

Iron & Wine: The Shepherd's Dog (2007)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Sam Beam was an important performer to me in the last decade, someone who brought the integral forces and potential of American music back into focus -- modern and vital and mysterious, untied to any specific time. When Kiss Each Other Clean, his latest album under the Iron & Wine moniker, was issued and felt like the letdown of the year to me, I got the urge to scramble back and reevaluate a record I came to absolutely adore a year after its release, The Shepherd's Dog, the third I&W album and the first I bought. I would soon discover even greater pleasures in the prior Our Endless Numbered Days and any number of peripheral releases, but Shepherd's Dog opened up a door for me. When encountering fans who felt that this record was moving too far in a polished, lush direction, I balked. But now that I have had the same reaction to Kiss, I tend to wonder: am I turning into one of those people? A fresh appraisal of Shepherd's Dog seemed fair.

Short answer: No way. Recorded and released in what now seems like a quaintly hopeful time, The Shepherd's Dog has worn its first four years gracefully. None of the MOR hangups that mar Iron & Wine's major label debut exist here, and all of its charms are as intense and its music as impressive as ever. Beam's intricate folk, already breathtakingly beautiful on his first two LPs, seems to open up as the curtain of a theater here to reveal a pastoral landscape dotted with menace and private emotion, elation to bitterness to sorrow but never emptiness.

Undeniably, Shepherd's Dog does stand out from Creek Drank the Cradle and Days: gone is the lo-fi simplicity, in favor of a carefully produced musical kaleidoscope: more percussion than ever before, electric guitar, piano, elements of heretofore unexplored rhythmic valleys, generally the sound of an actual band, which does wonders for the liveliness of these songs and the flights they take. Beam's populist sweetness -- the spinning-around childhood spilling into college-age reflection, an easy connection either way -- allows for a relatively easy Astral Weeks comparison; even if Shepherd's Dog has nothing like the complexity of that masterpiece, it's certainly what Beam strives for, a worthy objective for his talents. As his once-stark folk spills into busy, detailed, soft atmospheres, it earns a remarkable adaptability, the claustrophobic woodshed and the grassy field of "Brown Eyed Girl" approached with equal enthusiasm.

Little attention was afforded Shepherd's sequencing, but much of its magic can be attributed to the gradual build and climactic blush -- it opens with three delicate but assured anthems. "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" was made for the beginning of someone's road trip, the meaty classic-rock hooks of "White Tooth Man" delivering on every gritty Byrdsian promise Beam ever made, "Lovesong of the Buzzard" making glittery and raw romance of its desolation. Here, though, Beam sticks the knife in, with one of the strongest three-track runs in recent memory. The almost unearthly "Carousel" gives way to the creeping Appalachian glories of "House by the Sea" (very nearly the finest song he has written to date), then to the lyrically scathing, musically ecstatic "Innocent Bones" an unforgettable humanist relief quite conveniently sharing its year of origin with the Arcade Fire's similarly themed (and far less subtle) "Intervention."

"Wolves" returns to the spinning, layered intensity of the early cuts; anything would be a letdown after hearing Beam let himself go completely on "Innocent Bones" and its companions. A second series of more reflective gems, also unmissable, dominates the second half of the LP. Literate and on the verge of falling apart like late-period Big Star, "Resurrection Fern" suggests the direction one wishes Kiss Each Other Clean had pressed with, while "Boy with a Coin" lives exclusively in the moment of Shepherd's Dog with its teasing rhythmic and vocal tricks, a shower of noise, and "The Devil Never Sleeps" brings the fireside, perhaps slowly dying or creeping along uncontrolled.

Of all the record's many shimmering highlights, only the widely beloved "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" bears any suggestion of the overbearing balladry direction that Beam would choose to take next; because of his subsequent work, it now becomes a difficult song to listen to, but get beyond that and you can still detect the novelty, and the well-intended emotional crescendos. Most of its points, though, are made more succinctly elsewhere on the record (and are not hampered by vampire associations).

The all-important Specialness of Iron & Wine lies not in any cosmic-American skewering of roots music but in its sheer shorthand celebration of same, and the special (calm, collected, but devotedly passionate) way Beam has of tying it all together with his voice in a singular, personal manner. That world-apart wisdom can deliver a music that is at times indescribably lovely, a carrying on of Morrison, of Nick Drake, of Gram Parsons, of any unpretentious, dignified quiet master of song.

At its best, The Shepherd's Dog achieves something rarer than even Beam probably realizes: it's communicative of actual joy.

[SEE ALSO:]
Kiss Each Other Clean (2011)

The 6ths: Hyacinths and Thistles (2000)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Whereas the 6ths' debut album Wasps' Nests defied explanation and convenient pigeonholing, being a series of songs as instantaneous in appeal as they were obscure in origin, its sole followup Hyacinths and Thistles requires a setup. Released only a year after Stephin Merritt's magnum opus 69 Love Songs under the Magnetic Fields rubric, it feels like a low-key collection of potential leftovers from that project. Only Merritt probably knows if that's the case, but most of the songs could have fit comfortably as minor entries in 69 with its smart, mannered use of guest vocalists. It's worth approaching, then, as a sort of Magnetic Fields b-sides comp, only with no Merritt-sung tracks. That comparison ends up meaning more than its association with the 6ths. Wasps' Nests felt like a large-scale undertaking, and an important one to Merritt, in every sense -- its major label backing down to the caliber of its guests. The feeling of a toning down on this far more modest release is unmistakable.

That's not to say Merritt isn't up to his usual brilliant business here. Who could argue with the sheer spectacle of American icon Odetta singing a Merritt auto-standard called "Waltzing Me All the Way Home," or synthpop celebrities Gary Numan and Marc Almond nailing the bleeding mechanical emotion that always cuts to the core in the Merritt canon, or Katherine Whalen (Squirrel Nut Zippers) given at last a song worthy of her abilities, the charming and strange "You You You You You?" But inevitably, nothing here adds up to the emotional heights of 69 Love Songs, the ample cream of that particular enormous songwriting crop having already been exploited. (The Magnetic Fields wouldn't release another album for four years after this.)

Still, a few moments stand out as unique, some of them sublime. Bob Mould is such an unlikely fit for Merritt's songwriting stylistics that it's a joy simply to hear them collaborating, on "He Didn't." Cibbo Matto's Miho Hatori gives the artful gift of a lifetime with her almost unbearably sweet reading of "Lindy-Lou," and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon is irresistible on the achingly brief "The Dead Only Quickly." And there are the traditional '90s Magnetic Fields soundscapes, halfway between Cole Porter and Vince Clarke: "Give Me Back My Dreams," "Just Like a Movie Star," and "As You Turn to Go" feel almost unnaturally divorced from Merritt's more famous outlet. But not everything is well-advised. The record's sixty-minute runtime is enticing until you realize nearly half of it is closing track "Oahu," an agreeably minimal pop song that descends rapidly into a bare, simplistic keyboard line repeated over and over and over and over again, ever slower and more plodding, until it unceremoniously stops (or, more likely, until the listener shuts it off).

All Stephin Merritt's projects are worth consideration, and this is no exception; no Magnetic Fields collection is complete without it, and the fan of Get Lost and 69 Love Songs will find many pieces here to win their heart and add to the tremendous canon. Take it as a no-nonsense collection of fine melodies and rhymes from a first-rate songwriter, nothing more or less. Only when compared to Wasps' Nests does it fall short, which says more about the brilliance of that album than the inadequacy of this one.

[SEE ALSO:]
Wasps' Nests (1995)

Tennis: Cape Dory (2011)

(Fat Possum)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Additional point: Light as the breeze and equally enjoyable, even invigorating, when it's playing, this album has absolutely no presence once it's done. It is readymade for early spring listening, though, so keep it around at least till early May; I doubt it will have much staying power beyond that. Also, Amber pointed out while we were listening to it again this week that the guitar playing and rhythmic ease is akin to the doo wop / Sun Records / Van Morrison sound the Walkmen have adopted on their last couple of albums; this also goes back to the skewered classicist '50s texture in Television's "Prove It"... which just goes to show, you can make anything lightweight and bubbly if you try hard enough.

The Kinks: Kinda Kinks (1965)

(Pye [orig] / Castle [reissue])

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

After the hardscrabble, consciously raw R&B of the Kinks' debut album, Kinda Kinks finds the band smoothing out some of its rough edges while finding their aggressive muse much more convincingly, their time on the road having paid off in their performance abilities. Despite its reputation as amateurish and vapid, this is the first excellent Kinks LP, although it is enhanced vastly if you track down the 23-track CD version.

The appeal of Kinda Kinks is that it captures Ray, Dave, Mick, and Pete at their peak as the band they initially intended to be: frayed-edge Big Beat confrontation snarlers. In modern parlance, think of it as punk-blues: "Look for Me Baby," "Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight," "Come on Now," and "Got My Feet on the Ground" have the grit of the Stones with an extra push -- Ray writes in the American black music vernacular far more convincingly than his peers. Unfortunately, his voice continues to strain, all too dignified and British to really wash over the consistently excellent music. That's a minor carp when the band is so tight, the songs so addictive and convincing. You forget any problems you have with the presentation and dance your ass off. (And Dave's much more limited voice, perversely, can really sell a groove.)

The number of covers on Kinda Kinks is reduced dramatically; we're left with two, an able and impressive "Naggin' Woman" and a crushingly tepid "Dancing in the Street," although it's a sort of thrill to hear the Kinks take on Motown so soon after the covered song was recorded. The original is just too famous and beloved, and there's no comparison, and to boot Ray is far out of his element.

But where Kinda Kinks really spreads out is on the ballads, which find Ray coming into his own at last. The delightfully catchy "Don't Ever Change" and "You Shouldn't Be Sad" owe a bit of debt to Paul McCartney's slow ones for the Beatles, but their charm is considerable, while "So Long" -- on which Ray even sounds like Paul -- carries the weight and emotion of something like "I'll Follow the Sun" even farther. Without the vague hint of self-regard and pretension McCartney always brought, "So Long" nails a romantic longing and regret with painful ease that foretells the many treasures to come in the Kinks' catalog.

The most famous of the more toned-down and sophisticated songs here, "Tired of Waiting for You," gave the Kinks a smash hit (their last for twenty years in America), and it's a unique, stunningly far-reaching bit of adolescent heart. Ray Davies mumbles out much of the vocal from what sounds like the corner of his mouth, as though he doesn't really want to hear, while the band seems to intentionally plod along to suggest the boredom with which the narrator struggles. Held-back quiet anger, sustained for three minutes, would soon become a Kinks treatment; "Set Me Free," heard in the disc's bonus tracks, is an equally stirring example, while "See My Friends" adds vaguely Eastern textures and a menacing drone to craft one of the most remarkable early Kinks records, on which the band begins to lose their handle on the anger. Instead of giving vent to it at last, they'd come to move in the opposite direction.

"Something Better Beginning," familiar to Americans for its inclusions on the first Kinks Greatest Hits record, is a forlornly tentative romantic classic, with an apprehension toward new love that's atypical for pop lyrics and mature far beyond the band's years. But most intriguing of all is "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl," buried on Side One with most of the fast ones, capturing a creeping, brooding Skip James undercurrent with the put-upon sensitivity of Davies' more accomplished new songs. He still can't compare to the blues greats, but he finds a niche here, a low-toned near-growl full of nuance and hurt that makes one wish the band had recorded more in this regard. It sounds unhinged, scary even, and there's nothing else like it in the Kinks universe.

You will, however, bear witness to some equally striking material in the bonus tracks if you pick up the Castle CD (and, hopefully, the forthcoming reissue). As I said when discussing the first LP, I don't typically plan to ever discuss bonus tracks within album reviews, for two reasons: They're not part of a given album and shouldn't be a consideration when giving an opinion of the full product, and we will be discussing them in a different, to-be-determined format at a later date. But the first four Kinks albums depend too much on the bonuses, and have too much excellent and crucial supplementary material, for me to entirely ignore the extra cuts.

The classics stream forth after the album ends: "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy," a weird, skittering single that was quite a hit, even though it takes longer to fully comprehend than most of their '60s singles; the U.S.-beloved "Who'll Be the Next in Line," a prototypical nonconformist statement; the aforementioned two-pronged genius attack "Set Me Free" and "See My Friends"; and the sweetly cutting, brutal "A Well Respected Man," a rather obscure EP track that managed over the years to become one of the band's most popular early numbers.

But two songs you're less likely to have heard before stand out. First up is "I Need You," not to be confused with the near-simultaneous Beatles song, the most abrasive and ruthless early Kinks rocker. If "All Day and All of the Night" and reflected the band's growing virtuosity and accomplishment since "You Really Got Me," this casts a a shadow over both, bearing down on the feedback, the pounding, the crunchy guitars and delectably simple riffage, and (especially) the emotional intensity. It's inexplicable that this wasn't an A-side. "Till the End of the Day" would soon go even further.

The final track on the Castle CD is time-stoppingly incredible. "I Go to Sleep" is a frequently covered solo piano demo from the Ray Davies catalog, never properly recorded by the Kinks, but this deserves to be in their canon. A ghostly, panging lament of a loss, conquering her absence with her presence in his dreams, it is quite, quite a song, and Ray has never sounded ghostlier or more destroyed. Yet again, he explores vocal avenues here he would never again approach, and for all the brilliance the Kinks would offer in the years ahead, that is a pity. Do not miss this song. If buying some pricey import copy of Kinda Kinks is the only way you can get it, do that. Run, jump, fly to get to it. And don't listen to anyone else; if you dig the Kinks at all, you will dig this album.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Kinks (1964)

Destroyer: Kaputt (2011)

(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Let's get this out of the way: this is a brilliant record. Confounding, provocative, strange, rewarding, a singular thing in its own world from a singular mind like Highway 61 Revisited or Love You or Death of a Ladies' Man. So much going on here, indeed, it's too sophisticated to be readily dissected now. The summary is that Dan Bejar rambles and meanders over soundscapes borrowed from twenty year-old Hall & Oates slash Mr. Mister slash Thompson Twins slash Berlin slash Phil Collins slash Sting nonsense, replete with the cheap sax solos and a generally overwhelming lushness. And he sings these songs all like they're showtunes, like he has to fit every syllable he possibly can into an ever-shrinking number of seconds. This is unadulerated weirdness.

But it's a personable, warm weirdness, not the weirdness of, say, Ariel Pink, who can riff on the soft rock genre along with any number of other recyclables from his collection. But Bejar dwells on a preoccupation and fucks around with it until it suits his needs, not the other way around. Much as Leonard Cohen did in the late '80s, Bejar modifies a specific genre construct, a product of a time, and squeezes it until its age, its pangs of nostalgia, disappear, and it becomes just another noise for him to corrupt. Call it Gothic soft rock, or soft Gothic rock if you like, and think of it as highly peculiar 2010s Americana -- very distinctly based on the fridge buzz that probably circulated around Bejar when he was young, if he was, as the song goes, twenty years old in 1992.

The songs come into focus after a time, but initially they all seem to exist simply to serve one another and give a larger impression, blending together with Bejar's twisted, beautifully idiosyncractic voice weaving in and out. "Chinatown" sets the smooth scene, "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" brings priceless guitar and flute to a Peter Gabriel circus, the slyly romantic "Poor in Love" offers an intriguing build and stark variation on the trad soft-rock sax, "Downtown" provides AM choral female backing alongside Tom Waits-level insistence, and everything else surrounding "Song for America" gives in to its slick bass line. But three cuts offer well-paced climaxes: "Savage Night at the Opera" quickens things up stunningly with its earnest OMD ba-da-da-dum pop; the title track's shimmering 1980s evocations come equipped with crazed propulsion and the album's most sophisticated melodic trickery. At last, "Bay of Pigs" is the full-on ejaculation, the extended cacophonious triumph of broken-mirror pop music, its tension teasingly ever-mounting.

But so much of Kaputt's art and craft (if not pleasure) is in the power of Bejar's phrasing, the way he forms his coos and cries around his words, the way they jut out and seduce from repetition and command. His obliquely expressed, carefully sung words begin to wrap around the listener, their memory lingering at times as strongly as that of the songs themselves: "walk away, I can walk away"; "I write poetry for myself"; "I won't and I never will"; "Don't be ashamed and disgusted with yourselves"; "Set the loop and then go wild"; "Enter through the exit and exit through the entrance"; "I look up, I see the north star"; "Wasting your days chasing some girls-- all right, chasing cocaine to the backrooms of the world" (repeated immediately, fully aware of how striking it is); "Wandering around the world"; "As apocalypses go, that's pretty good sha la la, wouldn't you say?"; "Christiiiine!"

The record is much more than a glide through adult contemporary conventions with brilliant lyrics; Bejar celebrates those clichés and magnifies their appeal. This is not a challenge to reevaluate old music, or -- how condescending -- an attempt to make something bad into something good. There is straightfaced love here, and that's hardly the point since this is hardly a simple tribute. I'm not a Hall & Oates fan either; the thing is, H&O never exposed this much, never offered themselves like this. Destroyer might be banking on ghosts of the past here, but in the same manner of so many lo-fi and chillwave artists; Dan Bejar runs across and over his predecessors and devises something that belongs to him -- could in fact be no one else's.

Sam & Dave: Sweat 'n' Soul- Anthology (1965-71)

(Rhino)

!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!

There ought to be a word more evocative than "permanent" or "eternal" for music that, five decades after it was recorded, continues to sound as fresh and renewed as Sam & Dave at their best. Rhino's 1993 compilation Sweat 'n' Soul captures exactly that, with a flawlessness and drive that can make even a relatively familiar discography seem like a miracle. If, however, one is not already in love with soul's premier duo, this two-disc, nearly filler-free collection of absolutely flooring music will be both an education and a delight. It's difficult to imagine a more persuasive introduction.

Here's the scene: You created the underlying give-and-take, the comraderie and subservience to romance, of an R&B duo -- two men playing off one another's strengths, each having the level of trust to build on whatever the partner brings. The result is a feeling of elation, constantly rising strength upon strength, a stairway to heaven of sorts. With some help from peripheral talents (Isaac Hayes and David Porter, most significantly), you're the author of the way this works, and you rode it through its glory years and its decline, as the relations soured, with the showmanship a constant: legend has it that when you play, so insistent and wild is your enthusiasm, so boundless your energy, that you and your partner leave pools of sweat on stage. (You can practically hear them forming on the live cut here, "Soothe Me"; the mood in the room is fucking electric.) And now these two asshole white comedians want you to play the intro to one of your hits so they can nab the spotlight for you and "revise" your song to fit their needs, hitchhiking on your coattails into the clouds, and rendering your creativity and gift marginal, just a preview for some culture robbery, right before they expound on how their audience should "buy all the blues records [they] can."

You are Sam Moore or David Prather. The white comedians are Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, the Blues Brothers, and you refuse. Even if there weren't legitimate personal reasons to do so, just as a matter of pride, it's also a brilliant sweep of quality control: even Otis Redding couldn't follow Sam and Dave, so how the fuck could a couple of drunkass SNL actors? Who stole your dynamic and your very act, no less. But you don't have anything to prove because the Blues Brothers will look pretty stupid in thirty years. And you will look better than ever.

When Redding requests being pulled off any tour that includes your group so as not to be upstaged, that means you're onto something, and Sam and Dave -- sharp decline ignored -- are the textbook example of how a stratospheric career, one that can turn such a snub into such an honor, must work. Heard today, their music captures so much of the grand scope of soul music in the '60s and '70s in a single place, with an astoundingly easy versatility: they are the Ohio Players, Otis Redding, and Jackie Wilson in one package. Better yet, Rhino here suggests that their catalog has just as much depth, an element of their staying power that's been given little to no credit.

Opening their career as relatively standard (but still excellent) rhythm-and-gospel balladeers and ballers, Sam and Dave would explode with the massive, charged, leeringly confident "Hold On! I'm Comin'," but suggestions abound in the prior tracks here. The contained celebration in "A Place Nobody Can Find" is what Van Morrison has spent his career grasping at, the falling apart organ in "Goodnight Baby" shows no fear of the unconventional, and "You Don't Know Like I Know" signals something new in its sheer assurance. Even something like the run-of-the-mill Redding derivation "I Take What I Want" has a sting and conviction that set Sam & Dave apart. Something in their fusion of rock & roll as a complete, uncluttered music with the raw gospel that gave rise to it (see "Born Again" for an amazingly late example) simmers and bubbles, threatening to wreak havoc on every typical ideal of soul music.

James Brown got there first, sure, and Sam & Dave could never match that man's earth-cracking capacity, but they exist on a parallel plane that carries both considerable innovation and remarkable adaptability -- it's difficult to imagine anyone with a taste for western music of the modern era who wouldn't respond to these beats, these voices, this expression of body exhiliration. Hayes and Porter's production pokes, prods, and stabs with an unmatched focus, engineered to craft songs that must be danced to, or gone to bed with. "I Got Everything I Needs" has the sweetest horns and vocals to ever live in your ear, and "Blame Me" truly is infinitely sad in the most ingratiating fashion.

Sweat 'n' Soul really starts to cook wih "You Got Me Hummin'," a sex jam with grand bass and piano, which progresses nicely into the arresting smoothness of the classic "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby," the Wilson Pickett sunshine of "Small Portion of Your Love," the sheer inexhaustability of "I Don't Need Nobody." And these records, quite simply, sounded magnificent. Mostly recorded live (in classic Stax tradition), they are as admirable when buckling under trends (big beat on "Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody") as when founding them (prototypical slow jamming on "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," and the organ line on "That's the Way It's Gotta Be" is the beginning and end of everything), which is one reason that this fascinatingly vital collection is never boring or tiring -- it's easy on the ear, even heard all at once.

Highlights are the norm rather than the exception here, and some have pleasures that stick out before the songs even sink in: "Toe Hold" is an organ stomp with some choice lyrics about romantic "malnutrition," a funky horn section enlivens "The Good Runs the Bad Away," a surprisingly unsentimental economic strife comment hides behind traditional sentiments on "Rich Kind of Poverty," and stuttering grooves ("Wrap It Up"), rapid fire vocals ("Can't You find Another Way"), nasty bass ("Come on In"), unflagging intensity ("You Don't Know What You mean to Me"), and bright slinky joy ("This Is Your World") are the order of the day, all of the time, in Sam & Dave's world. Surely their catalog contained some lax moments, but Rhino brilliantly ignores them. Even the selections from their decline, a determined "One Parts Love / Two Parts Pain" and engagingly funky "Jody Ryder Got Killed," stand up seamlessly.

Still, certain songs announce themselves as centerpieces, and they are as stunning as one would expect. "Soul Man" is a masterpiece of reassurance that still burns hard and fast after all these years, a statement of purpose whose crossover success (in Cashbox, at least, a #1 pop hit) was a big enough deal to open doors (and not just for Moore and Prather). "Broke Down Piece of Man" again suggests a potential lawsuit against Van Morrison with its filthy springtime sound and sophisticated production. And "Don't Turn Your Heater On," derived from the Mar-Keys' "Last Night," manages to one-up a classic.

But, even on a compilation with so many classics and unknown gems and the completely undeniable to any sane person "Soul Man" and "Hold On! I'm Comin'," the knockout, fuck-all highlight is a song Sam & Dave aren't even famous for covering. Their relatively obscure version of "You Left the Water Running," driven by electric guitar, is advanced beyond all genre constraint, as intelligent, as calculated and pop-charged, as masterfully otherworldly as a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record. For whatever price you pay to get the Rhino set, this is the moment when it becomes completely and undeniably worth it, a beautiful capturing of an arm-waving truth to keep forever.

We've not talked nearly enough about Sam and Dave as performers, as singers. Their dancing, their full-on grooving, is well documented, and don't say you can't hear it on their records. On their own, tenor Sam and baritone Dave maybe wouldn't have had terribly striking voices. Certainly neither could have tapped into the market on their own the way Redding or Sam Cooke did. But the power, the energy, the mutual engagement and familiarity of their interplay, the passion that drips from it more than any bodily substance, that is something you shouldn't be able to put on a record. But Stax found a way, and centuries or millennia from now someone will hear this and realize that something beautiful, real, and celebratory could come out of a civilization full of strife, hatred, fear. When you're this gifted, you're kicking against the darkness even when you're singing about lost love and midnight fucking. Especially then, in fact.