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- Summary: With the help of three of the surviving Funk Brothers, Phil Collins recorded some Motown favorites for his first studio album in nearly 10 years.
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- Record Label: Atlantic
- Genre(s): Adult Contemporary, Pop/Rock, Contemporary Pop/Rock
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Top Track
| Going Back | |
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| I think I’m going back To the thing I learned so well in my youth I think I’m returning to All those days when I was young enough to know the... | See the rest of the song lyrics |
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 7
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Mixed: 4 out of 7
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Negative: 1 out of 7
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So faithfully have Collins and his confreres recreated the Sound of Young America--shimmering tambourines drowning out drums, bass compressed to a fat, distorted throb--that it's hard not to be swept along.
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There are no particularly new revelations. Fact is, these were damn good songs back in the 60s, and they're damn good songs now. Collins fares most gloriously on upbeat tracks like "Loving You is Sweeter than Ever" and the undeniable groove in "Talkin' About My Baby," where Collins demonstrates his smooth falsetto.
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Most of Going Back is devoted to the tried and true, though, the hits that remain staples on oldies stations across the globe, and whenever Collins is singing "Heatwave," "Uptight," "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," "Jimmy Mack" or "Going to a Go-Go," the album inches away from being a labor of love and into pure nostalgia trip, but even then the album is pleasant enough that it's hard to complain.
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Collins takes on 18 tracks in an outing as understandable as it is unnecessary, a high-priced karaoke spin for the ersatz prog-rock-percussionist-turned-master-of-the-'80s-pop-single.
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UncutFor anyone else, Going Back is a heartfelt but pointless exercise in ersatz soul. [Nov 2010, p.84]
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He sticks so closely to the original arrangements that his shortcomings as a vocalist are painfully evident. Had he tried to reinterpret the classics even a little bit, we wouldn't be so quick to compare his singing to the originals.
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With so much of the joyous, uplifting and just plain life-affirming Motown back catalogue freely available (not to mention the any number of soul all-nighters dotted across the country), Going Back is a redundant exercise into one man's nostalgia.
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