- Record Label: Anti-
- Release Date: May 25, 2010
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Sometimes torchy and always gut-wrenching, her knowing rasp pushes the album onto terra firma between the blues and power pop.
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As promised, the disc is a journey through vintage British rock, but her simmering, brooding John cover shows just how freely she’s chosen to adapt some of the most famous songs in the pop canon. That liberty is well taken.
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Divine intervention aside, it's a matter of the unparalleled depth of LaVette's interpretive skill that she can take a covers album and make it sound like a collection of originals.
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She uses every scrape, shout and break in her raspy voice, with a predator’s sense of timing, to seize the drama of a song.
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Now in her mid-sixties, LaVette is singing better than ever, and if she isn’t a household name, she ought to be. This is a remarkable album because this lady is a remarkable singer.
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She occasionally indulges in vocal gymnastics just because she can, but LaVette’s voice revitalizes transcendent lyrics that many of today’s top female singers wouldn’t be able to handle.
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Yet if the title is straightforward, the music often isn’t, with LaVette teasing out new emotional details from songs that seemed to have given up all their secrets decades ago.
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It's hard not to appreciate the karma of some of the most well-worn rock standards of LaVette's hard-fought early years rendered new again through a voice time almost forgot.
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There are flat parts when the band takes shelter in its mid-tempo comfort zone, and not every song is a triumph. But each one feels personal and full of intention.
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MojoLaVette says thank you to the British Invasion for bringing soul back home. [July 2010, p. 103]
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Curiously, this British Invasion collection lowers the heat.
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She transforms The Word, from Rubber Soul, into a strutting funk-gospel exhortation, and Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here into a conversation with ghosts from her past, but the passion she evinces grows wearying when it is for singing rather than the songs.
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For roughly half the tracks, her performances are revelatory....Elsewhere, her reinventions are less successful, perhaps because the originals themselves are so perfect, or maybe because her go-to emotional state—eyeball-scratching angst—isn’t necessarily the perfect tone for “Wish You Were Here” or “Nights in White Satin”.
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The album definitely could’ve used a little more friskiness; as it is, a horn-spackled version of Derek and the Dominoes’ “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” and a brisk run-through of the Beatles “The Word” are the only moments where LaVette busts loose from her always heart-felt, but sometimes overly earnest, introspection.