You’re going to think I’m being unfair. You’re going to hear the snippets I attach and you’re going to think this is a good-to-great soul album. And yes, you can peel 30 seconds from any given track from Roberta Flack‘s third record, 1971’s Quiet Fire and hear a collection of great musicians by lead by a sensitive and smart interpreter.
You’ll hear track one, the driving rocksteady beat of Go Up Moses, or the echoing blues take on the Bee Gees To Love Somebody and hear earthy, loose-limbed soul. And you’d be right.
So why is this record such a disappointment? Because it never shifts gears, not once. It’s relentlessly mid-tempo, oppressively pleasant. Actually I lie, it does shift dynamics — to slow down even further; her version of Bridge of Troubled Water is so slow, portentous and — I hate to say it, given Flack never does this elsewhere, so far as I can see — self-regarding that it makes the original sound like The Ramones.
So give it a listen through, grab the one or two tracks that grab you most, and stick them on a Sunday afternoon playlist with Compared to What.
Dancing to Architecture 