Word: soulfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Across four albums, Red House Painters have offered confused, despondent, tender love songs that seem less creations of music than excavations of the soul. A kind of gray, rainy day alternative folk; soundtracks to uninvited solitude between cold, stupid bedsheets. To watch them perform, while indignantly immured in a crowd, hovels away from the sacred gloomy-wombiness of the old bedroom, is a bittersweet and some-what discomfiting experience...
...such as Kool and the Gang and the Commodores. The retro stamp is not necessarily a label that the band should seek to avoid. In fact, Tony Toni Tone has become one of the most unique and outstanding contemporary groups because they have reinterpreted key elements of the classic soul tradition...
...road with their 12 piece touring band. Many current groups tour accompained only by the canned sounds of a DAT machine, and some of these singers cannot even duplicate their vocal stylings outside of a recording studio. For example, I once witnessed the pitiful spectacle of the trio Soul for Real failing miserably in their attempt to duplicate the lush harmonies of their hit single "Every Little Thing I Do" live in concert. The sounds of many current R&B groups may be similar to the unstable man-made elements--they can only exist through the intense efforts by producers...
Tony Toni Tone's memorable and timeless melodies are also reminiscent of the legendary soul acts. Songs such as "It Never Rains (In Southern California)," "Anniversary" and "(Lay Your Head On My) Pillow" are some of the few truly classic slow jams of the 1990s. Not only are their melodies enduring--the band's lyrics are also finely crafted. They are often seductive but never raunchy, sweet through not saccharine, and are always on the right side of the fine line separating light-hearted from vacuous. Furthermore, the band is known primarily for the quality of its music...
Cynics may reflect: there is no forgiveness for the marvel who writes a brilliant, successful novel, one of those rare, resonant tales that every literate soul burns to read. On pain of universal outrage and derision, the marvel's next book and all succeeding ones must be even grander than the first, and, while precisely the same, also boldly and completely different. Reviewers, who are in charge of outrage and derision--as well as words like resonant--will pout like rejected lovers at anything short of incandescence...