There’s something romantic about Archie Bell and the Drells. In their ragged, wide-eyed charisma, their proud Houston provincialism, one gets the image of them knocking on door after door like the heroes in a old musical, finally wearing down some grizzled booking agent with their chutzpah, their moxie, their razzamatazz.
Produced by Philly Soul luminaries Gamble and Huff — and notably raw compared to that pair’s lush and lumnious later work — I can stop dancing is the proto-funk band’s second album after they scored a monster hit with Tighten Up a year earlier.
Tighten Up is one of those anomalies — the B-side that suddenly shifts a million copies. It barely features the Drells at all, built instead on the work of Texas group The TSU Tornadoes, and Bell watched it climb the charts from while stationed with army in Germany. It’s a strange and beautiful concoction; those bright, frail guitar chords tiptoe over the bouncing assurance of the bass, the insistent feather-light drums, all tied together by our rambling band leader.
I suspect at the time, Can’t stop dancing would have been taken as a sign of the band’s limitations. There’s lots of covers (including an odd version of (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay with the lyrics re-jigged to describe Bell’s army experience) and we’re 8 seconds into the album before they re-purpose the Tighten Up riff on the title track.
But unto itself, its a delight. That glistening Gamble Huff patina, the bells, vibes and horns means there’s something pretty on every track, but it’s also lively, raw and raucous. This tension finds its best expression on the ballads. Love will rain on you might be the as good as anything they ever did.
The group’s later albums would take the Philly sound further, smoothing out the edges with billowing strings and big expansive drums. This approach would produce some more great songs (There’s gonna be a showdown, Here I go again) and some underrated disco fun — the group’s appeal was always charisma and enthusiasm rather than a joined up “artistic vision” so it makes sense their sound followed the charts.
Still, this record displays something at the band’s core, which was slowly eroded thereafter – the ragged, rambling show-offs of Jammin’ in Houston:
Dancing to Architecture 