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closeWednesday, Oct. 14, 2009
New CDs: Fred Hammond
Verity
Verity
The gospel singer Fred Hammond started as a bass player, and consequently he sounds as if he’s working from the engine room rather than the front office.
His music can be complex, and he sings from deep within its details. With Pages of Life, Hammond’s bestselling record from the late 1990s, made with his band Radical for Christ, it seemed that he’d set up a self-perpetuating system, concentric circles of chants and funk vamps, free roaming in his arrangements and the cycles of his amazing band and chorus.
His new record, Love Unstoppable, isn’t quite up to that level, but almost. It was recorded in a Dallas studio, some of it before a live in-studio audience, and it’s a record that won’t bore you: Its tight funk is drilled to perfection, but so are its crawl-tempo ballads, its single-voice a cappella turns and capacious guitar solos. (The ’80s arena-rock tradition of the heroic guitar solo has moved into black gospel.)
There’s some exciting music here. Hammond multitracks gorgeous vocal harmonies in Best Thing That Ever Happened. I Know What He’s Done is a sort of sanctified bossa nova via Stevie Wonder, with jazz-guitar harmonies. And They That Wait rides on fast Minneapolis-style funk with an ecstatic tag-team vocal at its peak. It takes in the gospel singer John P. Kee, who can be wild and fearsomely precise.
Hammond gives up the microphone several times: to Kee, to Michael Bethany and Ericka Warren for contemplative, unaccompanied turns; and to his son, Darius Sean Hammond, who asks: "Lord, bless everyone who hears this CD. If they don’t feel good, please help them feel better."
Fred Hammond isn’t playing bass on the record, though. This isn’t so bad, as Alan Snoop Evans plays roughly in his style, breaking into powerful melodic runs between vamps. But in some songs, like the ballad Lost in You Again, he sings with much more careful attention to the songs’ emotional surfaces; you might rather hear him get into the messy texture.
— Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
Love Unstoppable
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