Live albums are different. There’s no cushion between artist and audience; it’s all meat and potatoes personality, at least when it’s recorded the way that Brandon James fashions his new extended play Soul Sessions Live this autumn. Rather than toying with the kind of synthetics that have become rather commonplace in the pop genre over the past twenty years especially, this epic singer and songwriter gets back to basics in Soul Sessions Live, embracing the charismatic role of showrunner before an audience and giving us the sort of unique play that only comes with living in the moment. James isn’t the only artist in this genre that I would describe as being more than worth your time at the moment, but at this time his record outpaces anything I’ve listened to in pop this year.
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Whether original or cover, the songs that James selected for this EP are absolutely perfect for the range he’s got as a singer. Although he isn’t having to draw a lot from the backing band, he’s making the instrumental faceting in tracks like “Untitled” and his rousing take on The Beatles’ “Yesterday” feel as though it’s larger than life. He knows how to control the stage and the tempo of the audience without any of the percussive frills that normally accompany an epic performance, and if he’s this good in an intimate club environment, one has to wonder how amazing he would sound before an even larger audience hungry for the kind of soulful melodies he’s serving up here.
Structure is one of the most important elements of James’ modus operandi, and while he’s rejecting the notion of following a traditional pop model, he’s absolutely taking influence from the jazz school and experimenting with the parameters of every harmony in this record. “Everytime” and “This Aint Love” had my attention from the moment I sat down with them for the first time forward, and not exclusively because of the lusty cosmetics that this singer applies with his voice and his voice alone. He’s got the kind of talent for detail that I don’t hear or see enough of in pop music anymore, and in this record, he’s making it work to his advantage in a way that I want to see him exploit even more in the future.
If this is on par with what we should be expecting from the collective discography of Brandon James in the years ahead, I have a strong gut feeling that his name is only going to get bigger in the right circles sooner than later. He isn’t fronting with a lot of synthesized majesty in this piece; he’s outright giving us the raw talent that he can produce whether in front of one person or a thousand, and this is why he’s gaining the kind of traction on both sides of the dial that he is at the moment. I’m excited about his future, and anyone fixin’ for a bit of the classic soul most of us grew up with would do well to look him up right now.
Chadwick Easton