Thank god for small mercies. This is not one of those guest-infested albums featuring Rod, Eric et al hatched by some opportunistic label exec in cahoots with a modish producer keeping one eye on the meter and the other on a Grammy. It’s the Reverend Al doing pretty much as he’s always done.
Everything’s OK was made in Memphis, and sounds every bit of it. For your money, you get a rhythm section so lubed up and supple the players sound like they could crawl through an ossified intestine backwards. Hammonds gurgle, The Royal Horns parp and punctuate with bright yellow exclamation marks, The New Memphis Strings sweep, swoop and swoon, and a trio of backing vocalists layer the main man’s tonsil acrobatics in swish silk.
But therein lies the rub. The album sounds so perfect, or at least perfectly appropriate, it excuses a multitude of sins in the compositional department. Like Nina or Aretha, the Rev possesses a voice so divine he could sing any old nonsense and pass it off as sublime. ‘Build Me Up’ and ‘I Wanna Hold You’ are not so much songs per se as chrome-plated vehicles for the headline act to exercise the most potent rasp since Otis, the tenderest falsetto since Orbison. Mute the vocal though, and the grisly spectre of mid-80s Armani soul shows its scrubbed-ugly face. There are exceptions, most notably ‘Be My Baby’ which does about everything you want an up-tempo Al Green tune to do: patented Stax lope, tambourine on the snare drum, effortless vocal. And true, you can’t take those big old showboat testifier numbers away from the man. Here, even a Cocker-standard ballad like Fisher and Preston’s ‘You Are So Beautiful’ acquires fresh shine, not least because Al plumbs the devotional in the lyric, rendering it equal parts hymn and silver anniversary love song. Same goes for slow burners like ‘Perfect To Me’ and ‘Real Love’.
Boil the whole thing down though, and there’s nothing here to either enhance or diminish Green’s good name.