Lay It Down

If somebody's going to make some money from an album that sounds like this, it might as well be Al Green himself. The Greatest Living Soul Singer is 62 years old now, and age has thickened his voice, but miraculously hasn't damaged it much; he's still got immaculate power and control, all the way up to that extraordinary falsetto. In fact, he sounds better this time than on his last few albums: less short of breath, getting texture out of the slighty worn patches in his range instead of trying to cover them up with shouting (aside from the throwaway closer "Standing in the Rain"). The production team (and half of the band) is the Roots' Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson and James Poyser, who manage to evoke the supple groove of Green's early-70s collaborations with producer Willie Mitchell more precisely than Mitchell himself did on 2003's I Can't Stop and 2005's Everything's OK. The arrangements, the mix, Poyser's Hammond organ tone, ?uest's drumming, the string sweetening-- everything is pure second-term-Nixon sound. (The horn section is the Dap-Kings Horns, who may be the only people who've maintained that particular tradition.) Even the major-minor changeups in a bunch of the songs are the same trick Green and Mitchell pulled off on songs like "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)".

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