The Soul Sessions
Joss Stone

Oscar Wilde once said that only a fool doesn't judge by appearances but one listen to Joss Stone makes you think that maybe Oscar wasn't always quite the smartypants he thought he was. Seeing this beautiful, blonde English teenager the first thought that springs to mind – actually, the second thought after wishing you were twenty years younger – is that she must be some bubblegummy Britney-esque pop tart. But then you hear her sing and your jaw hits the floor like a brick because the voice that comes out of this teen is more like that of a portly middle-aged black woman from Memphis with a taste for Marlboros and Jack Daniels. To put it mildly, the girl has a blistering set of pipes, as big and ballsy as a young Janis Joplin (but without all the oh-God-I'm-ugly screeching) and as down home soulful as a plate of fried chicken. Usually a girl with her voice and looks would be stuck in a skimpy dress and given a set of power ballads to over-emote on but her record label hooked her up with minor soul legend Betty Wright for this album of cover versions of mostly obscure old soul tunes done with a live band containing such luminaries as Timmy Thomas and Benny Latimore. You have to keep reminding yourself that she's only 16 and still lives with her parents as she sings ballads like Joe Simon's "The Choking Kind" like a grown-up woman with a string of cheating ex-husbands in her past rather than just some spotty boy at the local disco, and her tender take on The Isley's "For The Love of You" burns with fire way beyond mere puppy love – if I was her Mum I'd ask her who the hell she's been going out with. Her all-star backing band play it a bit too much on the conservative side for my tastes, at times the album sounds like a Southern Soul equivalent of the Norah Jones album, very tasteful and professional but one or two more funked-up moments like the cover of The White Stripes' "Fell In Love With A Girl" wouldn't have gone amiss. Apparently this is just a warm-up for another Joss Stone album early next year that will have a more modern pop-R&B-hip-hop flavour, the thought of which fills me with a certain amount of dread – I swear, if it contains even one power ballad or guest rapper I shall scream. [Official site]

Worldwide Underground
Erykah Badu

Even if it doesn't sell a gazillion copies "Worldwide Underground" will surely make the Guinness Book of Records as the longest damn EP ever released. I dunno about you, but where I come from 50 minutes and 10 tracks equals an LP, but Erykah insists that this is an EP and it's her record so I guess she can call it what she wants to. She clearly doesn't want this to be seen as the follow-up proper to "Mama's Gun" and it does feel more like a sketchbook of ideas rather than the finished article, an album – sorry, EP – with a free-your-mind-and-your-ass-will-follow approach that goes where the vibe takes her, song length and commercialism be damned. Not that her ass should always follow her mind as it does sometimes wander up some blind alleys here, like "Bump It" which starts off nicely as a warm and trippy floater with some slinky vocals but then drifts into four or five very long minutes of nothing but Erykah trading scatting doo-bee-doos with Zap Mama which crosses the line at which someone should have turned the tape off after about 30 seconds. "I Want You" is even further out of the standard R&B box, 11 minutes long and built around a one-note heartbeat of an organ riff over which Badu jazzily coos like a cat in heat, and then the song abruptly stops and Lenny Kravitz comes on to play a Hendrix-y guitar solo (as he likes to do). It's a great track, though like a lot of the album a bit like being at block party where the DJ has been smoking too much weed. The grooves tighten up toward the end with the tough electro beat of "Danger" and the rave-up "Love of My Life Worldwide" with Queen Latifah and Angie Stone which is basically a remake of Sequence's old skool classic "Funk You Up" and a happy reminder of the days when hip-hop wore a smile on it's face and didn't go around threatening to hit people all the time. While this album – sorry, EP – might drift around a bit aimlessly in places, Erykah deserves a whole pile of Brownie points for her gutsy and playful sense of adventure, and once you get over the initial "what is she on?" shock and give the loose-limbed vibe time to sink in, this mostly sounds very sweet indeed. It might not go on to sell a gazillion copies but I still think she's all that, if not quite with the bag of chips this time out. [Official Site]

Portrait of a Legend
Sam Cooke

Soul music without Sam Cooke is like physics without Isaac Newton, movies without Orson Welles, and literature without, oh you know, whatsisname with the beard who wrote plays. He's a fundamental part of it's DNA, one of the first to mix gospel vocals with R&B and give birth to the mutant offspring that became known as Soul. In a shocking state of affairs, this is only the second collection ever put out that covers his entire career in one handy pocket-size package and it's beautifully done, 30 tracks remastered to a brilliant shine and the proverbial only Sam Cooke album you'll ever need – if you're mad enough to only want one, that is. Sam was the Michael Jackson of the late 1950s (but without the dubious relationships with children and monkeys), a handsome young man in a nice sweater who produced a string of pop-soul confections that sold by the bucketload. Brylcreem-smooth classics like "Wonderful World" and "You Send Me" were the perfect swoony soundtrack to holding hands with a cheerleader while watching a Doris Day movie, so familiar and simple it's easy to forget how utterly genius they are – "Cupid" in particular must be one of the most sublime pop records ever – and Sam proved himself to not only to be a singer and songwriter without peer but a smart cookie who started his own record label and owned the rights to his own songs in an age when many black performers were being royally shafted by the music business. If his 50s work was pure candy, the real meat and potatoes on this album is the tracks he recorded in the early 60s when his music became less vanilla ice cream and more grits and gravy (how many food metaphors can I get into one sentence?) with blues and gospel elements coming to the fore like the loping call-and-response vocals on "Bring It On Home To Me" and the wild tempo of the horn-driven footstomper "Shake." One gem from this time I'm very glad to see included here is the smoky ballad "That's Where It's At" which drips with the sort of come-hither-baby sexiness Marvin Gaye and Al Green were to build careers out of. Then there's the glory that is "A Change Is Gonna Come", the majestic 1964 civil rights anthem (inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowing In The Wind" but don't hold that against it) which still has the power to put lumps in throats and goosebumps on flesh, not only because it has all the emotional force of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech given the year before, but also because it became Sam's epitaph as one of the last songs he recorded before he was killed in very iffy circumstances involving a seedy motel and a prostitute. For his life to be snuffed out just as he had recorded his greatest triumph is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions (or at least Buddy Holly-ean and Otis Redding-ean proportions) and a cruel twist of fate you'd laugh at as phony if it was in a Hollywood movie. Legendary producer Jerry Wexler called Sam the greatest singer who ever lived and this collection goes a long way to showing that he wasn't just talking bollocks, I'd give it ten stars if I had a graphic with that many.