L6 Sloop 12 Goat Boy 8

[rayge]

A Lou Rawls - You'll Never Find a Love Like Mine

B Lectric Workers - Robot is Systematic

[bungo the mungo]

i'm getting a bit cheesed-off with all the 70s soul picks but at least most of them have been new to me. rawls is a bit of an old chestnut and i was ready to give this to B but it went on too long and the effects on the vocals didn't work for me. i would need to be poppered up to truly get into it.

A with reservations.

[~ / % ? *]

A is a little obvious

but robo electro has never been my genre

A

[DayoRemix]

Not normally a big Italo-Disco fan, but it's a more interesting track than the Leisure suit, Philly Soul of Rawls..Vote B

[toomanyhatz]

Blah blah blah wheelhouse.

A.

Obvious? Maybe slightly. But I already know I love it, and that he sings the hell out of it. Capitol era with Axelrod production would've been better, sure. But I could waste a lot of time finding something nice to say about B and it wouldn't change the result in the slightest.

[Sneelock]

as much as I enjoy the electronicals - that one is WAY too "Mr.Roboto" for ME.
take it away LOU!!! A

[oh oooh]

Really enjoyed both of these. Lou Rawls is LIVING that song! he's ace. And the Lectric Workers has that crazy 80s thing of mixing shameless artificiality with treated vocals. I can nearly always dig that.

HOWEVAH I do have to give it to Lou

A

[Deleted]

I have a somewhat conflicted relationship with this period of mid seventies Philly soul. Sometimes it can be hugely uplifting, the seamless productions creating a cocoon of well being. However other tracks can leave me cold, they can sound formulaic and sterile, particularly when they go into "lover man" type clichés. I'm afraid this was more of the latter for me, the song just didn't do it for me.
The problem with B as a genre is that it can easily step into sounding like a cheap soundtrack for some naff film or TV programme from the early 80s. This does flirt with that slightly, but there are enough pulsating crescendoes to keep the excitement factor pretty high. A bit naff, but good naff!

B

[DarknessFish]

Perhaps I'm laying my personal biases wide open, but even looking at the still of A put me off listening to it, you know exactly what you're going to get. Smooth, standard soul, competently done. Not offensive to hear, but not memorable in any way, you couldn't pick it out in a police line-up of smooth 70s soul acts.

I wouldn't have picked B as 1982 either, this sounds way more dated than that. I like the main robo-lead vocals, but everything else is very cheap and cheese. When you watch a mid 70s TOTP at 3am, there's always something like this tucked away with Pans People or Legs and Co dressed as otters roller-blading around a scale silver-foil model of the Taj Mahal. But this isn't as interesting as that.

A

[fearlessfreap]

Lou Rawls did beer commercials -- A

[Reactionary Rage]

B is a fucking jam. One for the cognoscenti.

B

[Half Machine Lipschitz]

9 minutes of robo disco? No thanks.

A

[osgood]

An edited version of B, let's say below three minutes, might have got me thinking about my vote. After four minutes I was desperate to have it finished. Not for me.
Not very enthusiastic about this Rawls pick, but


A

[sloopjohnc]

A

Little trivia. Rawls replaced Sam Cooke in the Highway QC's when Cooke left for the Soul Stirrers.

[blue]

A shows up a prejudice I have against a lot of 70s soul. I'm sure I've heard umpteen dozen songs that sound exactly the same as this.

Italo disco is always fun.

B.