Like all Spacebomb records, the new covers album by English singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey and American musician Matthew E. White is as much about the Spacebomb sound as it is about the singers or the songs they’re singing. For most of the 2010s the small Richmond, Virginia, studio/record label has been refining a silky sound that recalls the florid productions of ’70s R&B visionaries like Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield without succumbing to revivalism. Rather, that aesthetic seems to form an implicit argument about how the past can be revived and even rewritten for the present.
Every Spacebomb record sounds good on some level, even one as minor as Gentlewoman, Ruby Man. Morrissey and White met at a Lee Hazelwood tribute show in London in 2015, singing “Some Velvet Morning” together and striking up a friendship. Vocally, they’re a fine match, each with a laconic delivery that makes them distinctive, albeit limited, interpreters. That Hazelwood tune didn’t make the album cut, possibly because neither is interested in assigning roles based on gender. In fact, part of the fun of this album is hearing them rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other. Rather than role play romantic conversations, they trade off lead and backing vocals, and their platonic dynamic only adds to the giddy bounce of Little Wings’ “Look at What the Light Did” and intensifies the eccentric imagery of Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You.”
With the exception of James Blake’s “Colour of Anything,” which here sounds like an outtake from the *Virgin Suicides *soundtrack, Morrissey and White fare better with the more recent material than with the old. They play it fairly safe on Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and they play it even safer on George Harrison’s “Govindam.” Somehow their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” is even more dour than the 1967 original, thanks to White’s heavy-lidded vocals and an all-elbows R&B groove. The song sticks out not merely as a poor choice of material but as the rare poor showing by the Spacebomb band.
Perhaps their most successful cover is the one that seems the unlikeliest. For many listeners—okay, almost all of them—“Grease” will forever be stuck to the 1978 movie like a wad of hardened bubblegum to the underside of a desk. Barry Gibb penned it as a last-minute addition to the film adaptation of the musical, and since then it has ushered several generations of viewers into that world of the idealized 1950s. By ripping the song right out of the opening credits and placing it alongside nine other covers, Morrissey and White manage to find a new way to hear “Grease,” one that is more Bee Gees than Travolta/Newton-John. They underscore the shaky self-assertion of Gibbs’ lyrics, especially that existential bridge: “This is a life of illusion, a life of control,” they sing together. “Mixed with confusion, what are we doing here?” If Frankie Valli, already an oldies act when he recorded it in 1978, spoke for a generation that had grown up only reluctantly, this twenty- and thirtysomething duo sound terrified that age might not actually grant wisdom.
