Other critics will surely pin down allusions of their own. Trap drums freshened up 24K Magic but there’s nothing comparable on An Evening With Silk Sonic, a loving yet slight act of nerd-dom.Īfter one listen, my scorecard noted the crystalline guitar glissando best associated with Motown session musician Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin (see: Marvin Gaye’s “ I Want You” or Ragin’s own “ Goo Goo Wah Wah”), the siren-like ARP synth from Kool and the Gang’s “ Summer Madness,” a whiff of the chorus from the Ohio Players’ “ Fire,” and the title of Rick James and Teena Marie’s magisterial “ Fire and Desire” (released in 1981, but close enough).
They even enlisted Bootsy Collins to host their lean game of musical I Spy: “Fellas, I hope you got something in your cup,” the beloved bassist from Parliament-Funkadelic announces on the intro. As a gesture of commitment, Paak got his chest tattooed with portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. With period-specific instrumentation in place, the exuberant pop hitmaker and the acclaimed rapper-singer-drummer with underground cachet recorded as their ancestors did, with just one or two mics for the entire room of musicians. The duo sought out particular drum skins to better replicate the sounds of the studio during the heyday of Gamble and Huff, when those songwriter-producers polished soul music to an extravagant sheen. Paak recreate the rhythm and blues of the ’70s.
After fiddling with the R&B of the 1980s and ’90s to great commercial success on 2016’s 24K Magic, Bruno Mars has assigned himself a more challenging project: Silk Sonic, a fidelity-obsessed act in which he and onetime tourmate Anderson.
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