The first thing to know about Smokey Robinson’s Gasms is that it’s a proper album—not a live album, a Christmas album, a standards album, or a celebration of the soul legend’s songbook thronged with younger guests, but an actual record of new material. He doesn’t make these often anymore. His last real album came out in 2009, the one before that a decade prior. Robinson is 83. Even assuming his enviable run of good health continues, at this rate there’s no guarantee there will be another.
While the pace of Robinson’s new material has slowed considerably since the ’80s, the quality has rarely dipped. Few of his peers have stayed the course as admirably as Robinson. For the last 40 years, nearly all of his records have been variations on the smooth template he perfected with 1975’s A Quiet Storm—unhurried tempos, yearning vocals, laid-back licks, and velvet adornments. Where his doe-eyed Motown singles with the Miracles were the embodiment of youth, A Quiet Storm introduced the sound he’d grow old with. Hearing Robinson’s eternal muses of love and lust animate him as thoroughly in his eighties as they did nearly a half century ago is one of the pleasures of Gasms, which at its best plays like the ultimate refinement of Robinson’s late-career output. Compared to 2009’s Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, which itself was a perfectly respectable victory lap, the songwriting on Gasms is better calibrated, the emotions more pronounced, and the production more sumptuous yet less intrusive, devoid of any tells about what year—or even decade—it might have been recorded. Like Robinson’s best work, it exists in a state of suspended timelessness.Consider the title track fair warning for anybody uncomfortable about hearing an octogenarian work himself up about carnal pleasures: Things get heated. Nonetheless, Robinson has a tasteful way of rendering blunt expressions of lust, and he never lets his randiness get the better of him, as he sometimes can (see his 2009 single “Love Bath,” a cautionary tale of the thin line between sensual and ridiculous). Even Gasms’ thirstiest numbers are filled with grace notes: The red-lit “I Keep Calling You” smolders with nocturnal longing, while “You Fill Me Up” reimagines gospel music as sexual climax.Robinson’s voice doesn’t do what it used to, but it still does what it needs to. He sings for the sheets, not the rafters, and what he’s lost in range he makes up for with tenderness. On the sorrowful “I Wanna Know Your Body” he mourns love he may never get to make; his wounded whisper makes the denial feel like a tragedy. A handful of songs like the peppy “Roll Around” and the lightly funky “If We Don’t Have Each Other” gesture toward his more ebullient pop with the Miracles, allowing him to get his pulse up a little without fully breaking the album’s mellow spell.
The list of notable musicians lucky enough to record into their eighties is small; the list of those with worthwhile albums to show for it is even smaller. But Robinson remains an indelible talent, and once again he’s made the kind of record only he can. What a treat it is, after so many years, to hear this pioneer remain in complete mastery of the format he created.
