One would have thought that after soul-crooner Eli ‘Paper Boy’ Reed was freed from the 1960s glacier in which he was trapped, there would then be a mildly comical period in which he learned to adjust to the modern world (got his head around Twitter or Lady GaGa maybe). Instead, his authentic soul sound catapulted him straight into a musical career.
On ‘Come and Get It’, his third album, Eli’s voice moves from a textured croon to a falsetto shriek while brass sections and funky guitars clamour for notice and he delivers slick lyrical poptastic testimony on behalf of his love-making skills (“You went from name-callin’ to callin’ my name,” he sings on ‘Name Calling’), his wounded pride (‘I Found You Out’), and his ability to worship the lady he loves (‘Pick A Number’).
Most crucially, however, he does all this without his producers even hinting that anything happened in pop music after 1969 (incendiary final track ‘Explosion’ sometimes conjures up the spirit of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but that’s really only because of the name, and the fact that the Blues Explosion were conjuring up the spirit of James Brown). Perhaps Eli’s whole life since the glacier has been an elaborately staged façade, akin to the one portrayed in Goodbye Lenin? Maybe his close friends and musical associates fear for what would happen should he discover it’s actually 2010? Who cares? Because while in theory it’s hard to get too excited about this youngster’s note-perfect musical tributes to the soulful past, in practice it’s hard not to dance, swoon or sing into your hair brush, as he struts his vintage stuff.