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Average White Band-Soul Tattoo [1996]

Soul Tattoo [1996]

These smooth, sweet songs will stick with you long after you turn off the CD player. From the funky Soul Mine, to the subtly reggae Window to Your Soul, it's one great performance after another. The production's excellent, and here is your first clue that Eliot Lewis is a blue-eyed soul to be reckoned with - listen up, and you won't be thinking about Hamish Stuart - Lewis has the goods to deliver. Pete Abbott and Roger Ball sound great, and Alan Gorrie and Onnie "Pure Evil" McIntyre are the vital soul of this band. (Ball and Abbott are no longer with the band, but they are still at it, and even better than ever. Fred Vigdor and the amazing Adam "Bomb" Deitch on drums have worked into the lineup and it's a must-see show!) If you love great Alan Gorrie tunes (and you'll also then love the great Eliot Lewis tunes here), grab this disc.The replacement vocalist for Hamish Stuart comes up trumps and Alan Gorrie is back to his best, writing and singing - a gem for any true AWB fan.















Average White Band - Cut The Cake [1975]

Cut The Cake Link 2

In the informative liner notes that he wrote for Rhino's early-'90s reissue of Cut the Cake, writer A. Scott Galloway explains that this excellent album was recorded under less-than-ideal circumstances. The Average White Band's original drummer, Robbie McIntosh, died of a heroin overdose in 1974, and the surviving members were still in mourning when they started working on their third album, Cut the Cake (which originally came out on LP in 1975). Steve Ferrone, a black drummer from London, England, was hired as a replacement -- ironically, he became the first black member of a Scottish soul/funk band that had a very African-American sound and a largely African-American following. Despite the fact that AWB's members still had McIntosh's death on their minds when they were writing and recording Cut the Cake, this isn't a depressing or consistently melancholy album; far from it. In fact, parts of the album are downright fun, especially up-tempo funk gems like "School Boy Crush," "Groovin' the Night Away" and the hit title song (which made it to number seven on Billboard's R&B singles chart). Cut the Cake is also the album that gave us the ballad "Cloudy" (one of the more melancholy tracks) and AWB's version of "If I Ever Lose This Heaven," a smooth soul classic that was originally recorded by Quincy Jones in 1973. The song wasn't a chart-buster -- it peaked at number 25 on Billboard's R&B singles chart -- but it did become a favorite among AWB fans and enjoyed a lot of exposure on quiet storm formats. AWB's members certainly don't sound like they're in mourning on Cut the Cake. If anything, they honor McIntosh's memory by showing their resilience and delivering one of their finest, most engaging albums.

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