It would not be an exaggeration to say that James Lidell?s the finest blue eyed soul singer in years, and thankfully he puts his pipes in service of the right stuff. Dude can seriously sing?one minute he reminds you of Otis, the next Sly, a brief detour through Marvin, a serious Prince workout, and then the dude goes and nails a great take on Stevie ?s style too. The production is really inventive and subtle. Songs like "Multiply" and "Game for Fools" start out sounding spot-on retro at first, but then little touches sneak into the mix later on that are decidedly modern ? the crazy keyboard solo on the former and the drum programming and subtle vocal effects on the latter. What keeps Lidell from massive cheesiness a la Jamiroquai is evident on "The City," the only real link here to Lidell?s previous crazy-beats-heavy and effects-laden solo album and his work with Supercollider. Its inclusion here helps ground the album in the present, and along with the brief live clip included in the enhanced portion of the disc, it is clear Lidell is a major talent. ?Mike McGonigal
Jamie Lidell
Multiply
[Warp; 2005]
Rating: 8.5
I first heard Multiply a few months ago, via mp3, without any accompanying press releases or literature to help contextualize it. A significant break from Jamie Lidell's prior work both as a solo laptop artist on Warp and as one half of Super_Collider (Chilean techno terrorist Christian Vogel carries the other half of that amulet), its breezy soul had me dreaming up back stories. Maybe these were all guest vocalists. Maybe Warp's promobot purposely mislabelled some old Stax record to put me off the scent. Maybe Lidell did some Logic voodoo on a vault of old soul reels and repurposed a bunch of lesser-heard Motown gems to fit a glitchier, Warp-friendly palette.
The real answer was simpler than that. Nearly five years in the making, Multiply represents Lidell's dramatic transformation from a knob-twiddling laptopper to a red-blooded soul singer. Where Lidell's prior solo work enjoyed a well-earned reputation for being difficult and forbidding, Multiply is among the most accessible records Warp has ever released. Backed by instrumentation from the likes of Berlinite squatters such as Mocky and Gonzales, and fleshed out by Lidell's robust, full-bodied voice, Multiply has the spirit of classic Motown and Stax. Whether in the breezy, sun-drenched title track, the soulful creep of "This Time" or the closing ballad "Game For Fools", it's obvious that Lidell isn't afraid of channeling (or repeating) history.
But while the song structures and Lidell's vocal style owe boatloads to the 60s and 70s, there's also a modern programming style at work here that separates him from modern day revivalists like, say, Sharon Jones. Listen to Multiply once and you'll be struck by how reverent it is; listen to it three times and you'll start to notice the microscopic digital artifacts and subtle tweaks that give it personality and pop. For all the talk about it being a throwback record, it's also true that a handful of these tracks probably couldn't have been made in 1995, much less '65. The wet funk of first single "When I Come Around" takes glitchy liberties with its percussion track and includes a stunning middle-8 where Lidell's vocal gets chopped, sliced and sprinkled over a merry-go-round; the goofy "A Little Bit More" sounds like nu-soul run through a slapstick plugin; the delirious funk of "Newme" is a nine-layer cake of boom-bap, Rhodes and horns, about six levels of which had to have been built after the fact, in the studio, on a computer.
Anyway, if the Maximo Park record wasn't enough to signify the end of days for the Warp of old, this should do the trick. Not just because it's one of the label's most commercially viable releases in forever, but because it goes to great lengths to lovingly namecheck the very strands of soul (i.e. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, etc.) that the old Warp very fastidiously avoided. While I'm not sure that people have as strong a sense of brand loyalty to Warp anymore, this is probably still going to go down in electronic music circles as one of the year's most polarizing records. But don't let the naysayers keep you from hearing this before the winter rolls around; boasting 10 gorgeous songs over a trim 40 minutes, this is exactly the kind of record you need in your summer.
-Mark Pytlik, July 5, 2005
Review by Andy Kellman
Head On and Raw Digits, the two albums Jamie Lidell made with Cristian Vogel as Super_Collider, remain thrilling meeting points between the lacerating, discombobulated electronic disco of Liaisons Dangereuses and the freak-flag-flying funk of early-'80s Cameo. Lidell's Multiply is more a successor to those two albums than his first solo full-length, 2000's relatively rigid and academic Muddlin Gear. Only now, he's gone a rather straight-laced route, retreating to things like mid-'60s Stax and Motown, James Brown, pre-Revolution Prince, and oh, you get the idea. The focus here is on Lidell's affected (if occasionally affecting) voice, real instruments, and real songs. Lidell's voice is rarely treated, unlike the alien moments on the Super_Collider albums, and it will be compared to a few soul legends, though it's just as deserving of parallels to John Fogerty and semi-obscure journeyman singer Shawn Smith (who, as part of a duo called Pigeonhed, made an unrecognized precursor to Head On in 1993). With about as much effort, Lidell could do wicked impressions of any earnest post-grunge vocalist. Though he's not against using electronics to his advantage -- as on the zapping, slightly hallucinatory "When I Come Back Around," which lands somewhere around an imagined Basement Jaxx remix of "Controversy" -- plenty of songs are knocked out with Hammond organs, horn blurts, handclaps, and all the other elements to make it as authentic as any neo-soul release. Since this is out on Warp, many will question whether or not Lidell's being ironic, but it's plain that he's being sincere, despite the affectations. He really is pouring everything he has into the whole thing, but there's so much overly earnest, reverential, "let's get back to making real music" energy floating around that you can sense it nibbling away at the desire to make something that sounds like today. And if that doesn't bother you, a couple issues with this album remain -- one being that at least half of it could've been made by a moderately talented hobbyist.
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