It's almost 20 years since Rick Rubin successfully repositioned Johnny Cash from a fading star in a terminally uncool genre into the walking embodiment of cool with American Recordings. In the interim, the late-career Rubin-style makeover has become just as much of a cliche as the album of standards from the American songbook. A release about a new collaboration between the Delfonics' William Hart, and Adrian Younge, a producer several decades his junior, said that the resulting album was going to be "what the kids call 'hip-hop'"-- which sounds a lot like an unappealing welcome to the rap game Rubin-Cash formula.
Fortunately, it turns out that Younge's approach towards working with an older artist is less like Rubin's and more like Quentin Tarantino's: Instead of aiming for gravitas and youth culture appeal, he's placed Hart in his own stylized and slightly warped vision of the past that's both a tribute to the Delfonics' heyday, a radical deconstruction of it, and something altogether original.
Younge and Hart's album doesn't actuallly sound much like a Delfonics record. In the group's late 1960s and early 70s prime, they were at the vanguard of the Philly sound that replaced the hard-edged funk that girded the popular black music of the time with a slick breeziness that could occasionally border on easy listening. Delfonics records were gorgeously produced, with Hart and his rotating cast of support singers floating layers of vocal harmonies over lush beds of strings and horns.
Younge-- who produced the album, co-wrote all of its 13 songs with Hart, and played a couple of dozen instruments on it-- exchanges all that for a sonic aesthetic that has more in common with the more eccentric strain of soul and R&B records that are so beloved by hardcore crate diggers and producers like J Dilla and Madlib. Instead of the luxe orchestration that was a trademark of peak-period Delfonics, Younge has given Hart idiosyncratic arrangements full of harpsichord, glockenspiel, and the electric sitar, which impart an element of campy psychedelia, but thankfully avoid crossing fully over into kitsch. With a mix that leans heavily on analog grit and high midrange tones, it sounds like the test pressing of a long-lost psych soul record rescued from a storage unit, and achieves a similar kind of retro accuracy that Younge gave to his soundtrack for the 2009 faux-vintage blaxploitation flick Black Dynamite.
For much of the album Hart sings solo, another departure from the Delfonics sound that we're used to. Purists might be consider the move tantamount to sacrilege, but it suits the material. Hart treats Younge's arrangements like an obstacle course, slipping nimbly through them with an agility that belies his age. His falsetto is still as crystal clear as it ever was, even if he has to bend the occasional high note in order to find the right pitch.
There are a number of potential issues with calling this record Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics: Crediting what's essentially a William Hart solo album to the group could be considered questionable, and Younge taking top billing on the record's title and artist credit is either audacious or presumptuous. And anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed.
Taken on its own terms, though, the record works. And if Adrian Younge's approach to the project becomes the new formula for older artists, then all the better. A musician demanding the respect they're due is understandable, but one taking their reputation and using it to crack open new artistic territory is much more interesting.
