Consumer Guide Album

James Brown: Soul Classics [Polydor, 1972]
Brown recorded nine of these ten cuts for King; every track is good and many--"Sex Machine," "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "I Got You"--are great. But they're so jumbled chronologically--side two jumps from '71 to '65 back to '71 to '69 to '66--that it's a tribute to Brown's single-minded rhythmic genius that they hold together at all. Hearing his classic '70s dance tracks in their original three-minute formats, you begin to pine for the extended album versions--devoid of verbal logic and often even chord changes, these patterns, for that's what they really are, are meant to build, not resolve. And the chief formal advantage of top-forty strictures is that they force speedy resolutions. A−