"When I saw that photo of the sun setting into the ocean, it seemed to express everything we were trying to say," said Supreme Jubilees keyboardist Leonard Sanders in the liner notes to Numero Group’s excellent rare gospel comp from 2013, Good God!: Apocryphal Hymns. It’s one of the rare comps–gospel or otherwise—that I find myself returning to time and time again, regardless of that long-passed deadline. That said, I’d be hard-pressed to instantly name any of the nineteen acts that comprise the set, be they Robert Vanderbilt & the Foundation of Souls or the Fantastic Goldenaires of Rocky Mount, N.C. But when Light in the Attic last month announced the reissue of California sextet the Supreme Jubilees’ 1981 album, It’ll All Be Over, their unforgettable contribution to that set immediately sprung to mind.
Formed in Fresno, Calif. by two sets of siblings, the Supreme Jubilees consisted of four Sanders brothers and two Kingsby brothers, all cousins who attended the same church. Whether you’re a fan of the Everlys or the Isleys, the Blue Sky Boys in the early 20th century or Haim in the 21st, the preternatural close harmonies of kin is one of the more sublime sounds on Earth, regardless of whether it's recording secular or profane music. And the Jubilees' ability to make their voices converge as one is sweet indeed.
The liner notes suggest it was a struggle getting the gospel group’s sound down in the studio. One half of the record was engineered by someone well-versed in country and western, but not inclined to give the group the kind of low-end their live shows dealt in. So half of the nine-track album has a lightness about it that apparently didn’t do the band justice—the group was forced to relocate elsewhere to finish the album. When they moved to another studio, tracks like "Do You Believe" and "You Don’t Know" have a heftier groove, the bass and hi-hats crisp.
There’s some talk in the notes that "If God had a disco, the DJ would be playing the Supreme Jubilees," but we all know he'd just have Larry Levan spinning the Joubert Singers' "Stand on the Word". Decent as the uptempo tunes are, in retrospect it’s the slower, more effervescent numbers that have a tactile magic about them. "We’ll Understand" is taken at a stately pace, the organ plaintive, the flanged guitar like the last tendrils of honey in a jar. "Maybe you can find some consolation in this song," they sing right before the chorus. When the organ wheezes and aligns with those voices, there’s a tingling sense of elevation.
But back to the title track, which also appeared on Good God!. It’s as the glorious as the golden sunset that comprises the cover art, even if it is a stock photo that numerous bands deployed for their own privately-pressed albums. "It’ll All Be Over" arches over the setting sun, suggesting that the afterlife is as beauteous as the Pacific Ocean come sunset, yet as warm as a baptismal dip in the Caribbean. The song itself is manna, the keys suggesting soul as well as Sunday service, with a woodblock beat clocklike even as it signifies that moment forever outside of time. When the Jubilees’s vocals meld together on the chorus: "It’ll all be over/ And we won’t have to cry no more." it devastates, not from that admission of death, of burden being released, but because it signifies that sheer beauty of the beyond. It’s about as close to a convincing argument I’ve encountered that the afterlife just might be better than life itself.
