Allen Toussaint: Life, Love and Faith : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Allen Toussaint's second solo album (his first came out on Scepter last year) is very much a producer's record: it sounds great. Like his past work with Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe and the Meters, the production here is bright, biting and uncluttered with emphasis on Toussaint's trademark touch–a chugging, heavily syncopated rhythm carried between the drums and horns which, the liner notes tell us, is derived from the sound of the "second line" musicians at New Orleans street funerals. In some ways the production is so tasty and satisfying that you hardly look beyond it for the first few listenings. After that, things get a little dubious.

Toussaint is not really a singer. That's OK–his flat-out, thin tenor style falls somewhere between mellow Lee Dorsey and no-nonsense Bill Withers which ain't a bad place to be these days. However, the problem is that Toussaint too often sings like he knows he's not really a singer; he just doesn't brazen it out enough and the vocals frequently end up sounding uneasy, tentative. He overcomes much of this apparent lack of confidence with the assurance of the production, particularly through the use of other male voices (quite possibly his own multi-tracked, though I suspect it's the Meters who assist instrumentally) layered under his own, echoing, harmonizing slightly and providing a cushion of depth. This works nicely, especially on the choruses (check "She Once Belonged to Me" and "Soul Sister"), but its use throughout becomes relentless.

Finally, it's not anything about the sound of the album that bothers me, it's the feeling, or lack of it. Even the best cuts–"Am I Expecting Too Much?," "Soul Sister." "Fingers and Toes," "My Baby Is the Real Thing"–never quite break beyond a rather carefully circumscribed range of expression, a sort of restrained funk. "Fingers and Toes," one of the most successful lyrics here, is so restrained the listener nearly has to punch it along by himself; give the chorus a lot more power and the horns some volume and thrust, and this would be a knockout. "Am I Expecting Too Much?" comes closest to succeeding on every level: Toussaint almost lets himself go, the chorus is deep and forceful, the arrangement is beautifully choppy and alive and who is that on sax sounding hotter than Jr. Walker? The vocal arrangement on "Soul Sister" is superb, especially the end-of-the-line repetitions, and the cut captures a spirit that seems to slip through Toussaint's fingers elsewhere. Yet the album haunts me with a sense of something missing. You get the feeling you could poke a finger right through the sweetly funky surface and find it hollow inside–a suspicion often strengthened by the lyrics (from "Electricity": "Sometimes I wonder if you're really real/or just a figment that I feel"). Just listen to "From a Whisper to a Scream" on the Scepter album, done with more conviction and substance than almost anything on Life, Love and Faith (and containing the wonderful line, "I took kindness for granted as if it came with the wallpaper"), and you know Toussaint has more in him than you're gettin' here. Am I expecting too much? =