Various Artists -Atlantic Unearthed - SoulBrothers / Souls Sisters

Mon 2nd Oct, 2006 in Music Reviews

The Atlantic Unearthed project involves some trolling through the old tapes in the Atlantic vaults in Los Angeles to find tracks which were either never released or haven’t been released on CD previously.

A worthwhile project? A gift to humanity? Milking the artists and listening public for every last cent that can be wrung from them? Bingo on option three.

That is the cynical view taken to the max obviously, but there is a reason that these unreleased tracks were unreleased, they just didn’t cut it.

Case in point is Sam and Dave who do this shithouse offering in You Left The Water Running. These are ambassadors of the soul world, why denigrate their memory with these substandard offerings?

In the same way that those Rainbow Records collections of Dean Martin songs were all the ones that no one listened to, so these offerings of some of the great names – Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Percy Sledge and many more, are less than they should be.

If you have every other song they have ever sung, sure then this may complete your collection, but while these are a nice easy listening offering for you to put on to fill an audio space, particularly if chatting to someone as background music, they just aren’t inspiring….