Lee Fields & The Expressions
Truth & Soul
(2009)

When did R&B music become so effete? Maybe it was the damage done by groups like Boyz II Men during the ’90s, when the genre had some of its most cringe-worthy, emasculated moments.  The recent slew of R&B releases, in the form of acts like T-Pain, is a far cry from ’60s and ’70s funk, R&B and soul, when music was free of Auto-Tune and full of vigor. Musicality and chemistry created some of the most memorable American groups of the past century, two things sorely lacking in contemporary R&B music. Inspired by the vocal chops of groups like The Moments and the soulful grooves of The Delfonics, My World is a reintroduction to criminally uncelebrated and slept-on soul singer Lee Fields, who gained cult status through several 7″ singles he self-released in the ’70s. Truth & Soul producers Jeff Silverman and Leon Michels, emboldened by Fields’ European success with French house DJ Martin Solveig, sought to break the U.S. scene just as soul divas Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones have revitalized a genre for new generations of music lovers.

This isn’t music from your high school prom in the ’90s, when kids slow-danced to sappy, slavish slow jams long committed to the bargain bin of your local record store. Lee Fields’ music has punch and soul. “Do You Love Me (Like You Say You Do)” starts with a solid rhythm section, with hard-kicking bass and drums accompanying a voice that hasn’t aged a bit. The music is unapologetically sexy, an antidote to decades of unjust defilement of the genre. That’s not to say that Lee Fields is somehow rescuing soul music — on the contrary, he’s only giving further life to a genre that’s aged timelessly, regardless of its pop permutations. “Honey Dove” is the kind of piece that’s rife with hip-hop sampling potential, and given that the first time I heard the guitar and string instrumentals were on a remix of Clipse’s “Mr. Me Too,” I immediately took to the original (first featured in Fields’ 2002 LP Problems). Title track “My World” has Fields exhorting “the shallow hopes and selfish pride” of the world, and in a sense, he sings as an elder statesman bemoaning something lost not only in the music of today but contemporary society in its entirety. With legends like Isaac Hayes and James Brown having passed on in recent years, it’s a relief to have Mr. Fields keeping soul alive and teaching young boys like me how to properly love women.

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For more info on Lee Fields, visit http://truthandsoulrecords.com/lee-fields