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What separates retro soul artists from their neo-soul cousins is that the latter are willing to use contemporary production techniques while retro soul artists largely eschew those methods. Retro soul performers often use vintage 1950sand 60s instruments, and a mark of success is for these tunes to sound as if they were cut 40 or 45 years ago.
What separates retro soul artists from their neo-soul cousins is that the latter are willing to use contemporary production techniques while retro soul artists largely eschew those methods. Retro soul performers often use vintage 1950sand 60s instruments, and a mark of success is for these tunes to sound as if they were cut 40 or 45 years ago.
On Now!, the latest record by the Spanish outfit, The Pepper Pots have created what some would call a work of revivalist art (and other might less charitably call derivative). I tend to fall in the former camp because I know that Europeans have had a love affair with blues, jazz and classic soul for the better part of a century. The three women and eight men who comprise The Pepper Pots spent their young lives devouring the music of Marvin, Diana, James Brown, Aretha and Otis Redding just like four working class blokes from Liverpool spent hours listening to Muddy Waters and Little Richard.
This outfit clearly spent many hours in the woodshed studying the tight vocals and brilliant musicianship that came to be associated with the Motown Sound. Listeners will hear the jazzy drum introductions and bass lines and guitar licks that the Funk Brothers made famous on those great Motown Records.
The mature, sophisticated lyrics that were a trademark of Smokey Robinson and the Holland Dozier Holland songwriting team is something that The Pepper Pots found more difficult to master. That is not an insult by any means. As lyrical craftsmen, Smokey and HDH managed to write in a sophisticated way that made the adult themes they often touched on in their songs fall easy on young ears.
Besides, it would be wrong to suggest that The Pepper Pots songs are not well written. In fact, songs such as "Highway," "Time to Live" and "Young Girl," are strong lyrically and would have been right at home on Motown. It's just that the Motown songwriters set a pretty high bar.
Any artist has to be pretty courageous to attempt to cover the music of the 1960s - let alone try to make original songs that seek to capture the sound and feel of that era. Many people are weary of hearing the umpteenth cover of some Motown song. Meanwhile, retro soul outfits such as The Pepper Pots run some unique risks when they take on a project like Now! Terms like "cultural banditry" get hurled at bands like The Pepper Pots. That kind of criticism can be largely overcome if the band is willing to give credit to the people who influenced them, and if the group makes good music. The Pepper Pots score on both counts. Recommended.
By Howard Dukes