To best understand Richard Russell, watch him play “Please Forgive My Heart” in the studio with Bobby Womack. Outside of a few taps on his MPC, Russell’s almost not there, but as piano, bass, and drums move around the legendary soul survivor’s voice, his invisible touch provides the song’s underlying heartbeat. That unobtrusive quality helps explain how Russell has helmed XL Recordings into one of the lone record label success stories to be had in the 21st century, from signing a teenager named Adele to serving as the imprint that notoriously fussy artists such as Thom Yorke and Frank Ocean trust to press up their music.
While Russell put his own creative work on the backburner for decades, when he was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome in 2013, he decided to focus on making music again. That didn’t necessitate a move from the background towards the spotlight. For his latest project, Everything Is Recorded, Russell has surrounded himself with the XL Junior Varsity Team—meaning no Adele or Vampire Weekend, let alone Frank or Thom, but a few appearances from Sampha, Ibeyi, and Young Turks-signed Kamasi Washington. The bigger names that do appear on this album follow a similar attention-deflecting strategy to Russell’s, with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside near impossible to pinpoint without a credits list. The ultimate effect of all that ego sublimation is a somewhat scattered album with quietly stunning highs, if not much of a centering force.
Russell’s niftiest trick is take the premise that “everything is recorded” to heart, relying on his sampler to make voices from generations past duet with new artists in the present moment. But “Close but Not Quite” winds up being too on the nose. The song springs from a studio session where Russell paired Sampha with a snippet of Curtis Mayfield, finding a common ground not just in their heavenly, heart-breaking falsettos, but also their “gentle soul[s], in an era where a lot of soul artists were quite macho,” as Sampha put it in a New Yorker profile. The juxtaposition of string-laden early ’70s soul with 21st century machine rhythms is intriguing, but when both gentlemen address the theme of “speak[ing] the unspoken,” they end up undifferentiated, their messages redundant across the span of time.
Russell does better when he chops up a sample of Keith Hudson, whose haunting, brooding music in the ’70s and early ’80s earned him the nickname “The Dark Prince of Reggae,” for “Wet Looking Road.” The gloomy atmosphere and desolate vocal from Hudson provides an ink-black backdrop for British rapper Giggs. Similarly, when Russell utilizes the slink of Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” for “Mountains of Gold,” the sparseness of the track allows space for Sampha, Ibeyi, and Ratking’s Wiki all to operate effectively around Ms. Jones.
The surprise sax solo from Washington that closes “Mountains of Gold” feels like an afterthought, though, tacked on to the end of the song. The same goes for “She Said,” which pairs Washington with recent Rising subject Obongjayar. It’s a more nimble showing from Obongjayar than the abrasive song on Everything Is Recorded’s 2017 EP wherein Obongjayar shrieked over a distorted din from the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. Yet once again, Washington’s bold playing is reduced to a non-descript sax solo, made to grapple with a flatulent digital bassline from Russell.
The slower that Russell moves, the better for allowing the disparate components of Everything Is Recorded to settle into something exquisite, as on the gorgeous “Bloodshot Red Eyes,” an R&B ballad adrift in outer space. Quivering electric keys and a simple clap, plus a smattering of synthetic strings, are all that newcomer (and son of Ghostface) Infinite needs to send the track soaring. His voice transubstantiates heartbreak into something approaching the beatific.
The album’s other standout is “Be My Friend,” which also foregrounds Infinite, his voice layered this time so as to become a choir. Russell brings in a sample of Dallas preacher TD Jakes talking about the illusion of solitude: “It is possible to be alone and not live alone/It is possible to feel alone and not work alone.” It’s a poignant insight, but the same sample crops up multiple times across the album, so that by the time it lands here, it sounds like a rare miscue from Russell—a heavy-handed move from someone who’s trained us to expect a light touch.
