Give The People What They Want

Sharon Jones,The Dap-Kings

Give The People What They Want
Format
Audio
Published
10 January 2014
ISBN
5021456199662

Give The People What They Want

Sharon Jones,The Dap-Kings

While many artists have come and gone, why have Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings only continued to grow steadily in popularity around the world? How can they continue to sell-out huge theaters, headline festivals, and sell hundreds of thousands of records year after year with neither major label support nor a single radio hit?

The reason is simple: There is no other band around today that plays with the rhythm, feeling, or explosive power of the Dap-Kings, and there is no other singer that can match the energy and honest soul of Sharon Jones.

The culmination of these soulful attributes has never been so meticulously manifested as on their latest waxen treasure, Give The People What They Want. It’s all here, from ‘Retreat!’, the lushly orchestrated barnstormer, to the feel-good cruiser ‘We Get Along’, and the floaty balladry of ‘Slow Down Love’.

Give The People What They Want is an exercise in Soul Music of the highest order, but more than that, it’s a document of what happens when you fill a studio with some of the finest musicians and songwriters in the world and let the tape roll.

Track Listing:

 

  1. Retreat!
  2. Stranger To My Happiness
  3. We Get Along
  4. You’ll Be Lonely
  5. Now I See
  6. Making Up and Breaking Up
  7. Get Up and Get Out
  8. Long Time, Wrong Time
  9. People Don’t Get What They Deserve
  10. Slow Down Love

 

Review

Album number five from the inimitable Ms Jones and her Dap- Kings was slated for release last August, though these plans were put on hold when Jones was diagnosed with cancer in June. With the cancer now thoroughly licked, it’s time for soul sister number one and her crack band to get back to doing what they do better than anyone: namely, being the slickest, most bad-ass soul-funk outfit on the planet.

Album opener ‘Retreat!’ is a statement of intent if ever there was one and a song which has surely taken on new meaning since Jones’s grapple with illness. It’s classic Motown with a twist – all echo, big horns and bigger drums, and as Jones wails, ‘I’ll chew you up and spit you out’, consider yourself warned, be you an errant man or insidious disease.

Other highlights include the Northern soul stomper ‘Stranger To My Happiness’, and ‘We Get Along’, a message song which perhaps best encapsulates what makes these guys so damn special – the ability to draw on a form so firmly rooted in the past and place it smack bang in the here and now with complete authenticity.

Sharon Jones had her final chemotherapy treatment on New Year’s Eve and will soon return to performing live. If that ain’t soul I don’t know what is.


Declan Murphy

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