Post by tempfan on Feb 10, 2006 17:44:39 GMT -5
THIS OLD HEART OF MINE (IS WEAK FOR THIS STUFF)
Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald
THE TEMPTATIONS - REFLECTIONS
New door
** ½
It's fitting that the cover of this album shows the singers in silhouette. The Temptations have been an essentially faceless group for years now.
Small wonder. There have been well over a dozen Temptations' lineups since the first in 1961. Long gone are most of the voices that made this the best vocal group ever. Gone with them, some would say, is any credible claim to the storied name. But one thing isn't gone. The group still has chops -- musicianspeak for talent, ability, soul.
Reflections is a collection of updated Motown chestnuts, most never recorded by the Tempts before. Motown music is indestructible, of course; William Hung with a hammer couldn't damage them. But chops don't hurt. And the new guys, along with founding member Otis Williams, acquit themselves well. Particularly former Spinner G.C. Cameron, who stands in the slot once occupied by the great David Ruffin. He's an old school soul shouter who, while lacking the nuanced emotionalism of his predecessor, is certainly equal to the material. Ditto Terry Weeks and Ron Tyson, this generation's Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks.
The songs? An overly busy arrangement of Gladys Knight and the Pips' Neither One Of Us and Thelma Houston's eminently forgettable Don't Leave Me This Way are among the less enthralling, but Weeks and Tyson's sweet, earnest reading of I'll Be There compares well with the Jackson 5 original. The group wisely hews close to Jimmy Ruffin's doomed and confessional take on What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. And then there's Marvin Gaye's Can I Get A Witness, which is off the charts: playful, rowdy and irresistibly rhythmic.
But again, it's Motown. These songs are indestructible. Evidently, the group is, too.
Pod Pick: Can I Get A Witness.