| The main
thing is the vocals: Scaggs could sing the white off of ivory, but instead
of placing his remarkable and unique voice at the center of the record,
he places it within the context of the dance music he’s making, arguing
thereby for the role of the vocalist as shaping force within a dance song.
Again and again, bright, light numbers fall like sheets of rain, pulled
into seas of melancholy by the directions in which Scaggs’s voice
takes them. This goes rather strongly against the tendency of dance music
as its been for some time, and as it was then: nobody goes out dancing in
the hopes of catching some great poetry. People dance, rather, in order
to enter into a relationship with rhythm that began before our ancestors
came down from the trees and that will end only when the last of us has
gone down to his grave, his head still swinging rhythmically back and forth.
We dance because dancing is what our bodies were made to do, and only the
fact of our brains’ constant hunger for expansion prevents us from
doing it more often. What Juxtaposed with You does is to notice the
emerging primacy of dancing rhythms and try to gently wed these rhythms
to basic, lovely soul songs. The songs strain against their cages, wanting
room to stretch; the beat, and the strings and the horns, hold them in,
forcing out their most basic emotions like juice from pulp. When, as on
the opening love song “Still Falling for You,” their subject
is love outlasting its expected shelf-life, the transitory qualities of
One Song For Dancing collide with the permanence of The Dance We’ll
Continue Together Until We Die, and the result is an irresistible tension. |
