Pete Belasco – Get It Together
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Label: Verve
“Get It Together” is easily the best R&B effort I have heard in years. Like the first couple of solo Paul Weller and Jamiroquai efforts, Pete Belasco delivers more “pure” soul than any Motown record released in the past ten years. Sounding, at times, more like Marvin Gaye than the retro-white-boy-with-hipster-facial-hair that he appears to be, Belasco has succeeded in pulling the bell-bottoms over our ears and settling in on an authentic groove. Built around a steady diet of organs, strings and sax and guitars, Belasco has fashioned a bouncy bowling-shirt set of nightclub tunes.
The real beauty of Pete Belasco is his incredible range. Most R&B stars make concept records where they follow a singles thread throughout an entire album. This has always basically been the way R&B records were made. But Belasco glides smoothly through a spectrum of different styles. Beginning with the incredibly toe-tapping “All I Want,” an almost Ike & Tina Turner style R&B romp, Belasco mixes a spunky sax an organ with his silky but cool vocals. He picks up this boppy sax driven style on killer tracks like “I’ll Be Gone” and “Heat.” But the album is sequenced by alternating slow jams with poppy grooves.
This authentically retro 50-60′s masterpiece catches its breath between the upbeat songs by shifting gears into a slower almost Crowded House meets Marvin Gaye slow jams. On “Without Within” and “Love Train” you can almost see the smoky lava-lamp lit parties Belasco is playing to in his mind.
“Get It Together” is that surprise record I bought on a whim, forgot about, and then uncovered by accident after moving into a bigger apartment and subsequently rearranged my CD collection. Pete Belasco is the real thing, and the fact that Verve (a classic jazz label) released it is even further proof that this guy knows what he’s doing.
