About blooming time
Soul revivalist’s powerful third slips between eras to bear witness on the present. By Stevie Chick.
Curtis Harding ★★★★
If Words Were Flowers ANTI-. CD/DL/LP
THE BLACK-and-white video for his recent single Hopeful depicts Michigan-born, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter Curtis Harding accessorising his vintage polyester duds with a Covid mask. He slides behind the wheel of a late-’60s Chevy Nova 350 and drives past murals dedicated to the late civil rights activist John Lewis, on to a parking lot where he delivers his gospel to a simmering Black Lives Matter protest.
The clip’s blurring of eras is an act of deliberate anachronism. It infers that we’ve not progressed from 50 years ago, that a continuum of oppression, violence and hatred still prevails – but also, more optimistically, that the spirit to resist, by any means necessary, is equally inextinguishable. The video serves as a smart metaphor for the magic
Harding works throughout his third album:
If Words Were Flowers is firmly rooted in the sound of classic soul but speaking clearly and from the heart to everything that’s happening right now.
Harding and right-hand man Sam Cohen – also a regular collaborator with Danger Mouse, who co-produced Harding’s previous LP, 2017’s Face Your Fear – ensure the period detail is on point throughout. Bristling tambourines urge forward the insurgent Motown choruses of Can’t Hide It, while Hopeful’s horn-rimmed slow-burn gives way to a fuzz-soaked guitar solo worthy of Ernie Isley at his lysergic peak, and the hard-edged groove of Where Is The Love? could have slipped off a dusty Stax 45.
The fluidity with which Harding slips between eras is audacious – he’s clearly immersed in classic soul, but he won’t be defined by the past. It’s a point underscored by So Low, one of the LP’s highlights, where the downbeat flute funk is disrupted by the very 21st century vocoder effects Harding feeds his vocals through. Such moments of rupture are Harding breaking the fourth wall, reminding us that for all his vintage window dressing, he is singing of the world of Trump, of Covid, of George Floyd, the world outside our window.
A deft lyricist, his words are subtle but certain, his ballads haunting, his protest songs never preachy or cloying. So Low is the bleak standout, a modern-day refit of Gil ScottHeron’s Home Is Where The Hatred Is, a song of addiction and regret that struggles to resolve the conundrum, “Why do I get down, just to get high?” The anthemic Hopeful, meanwhile, grounds its optimism in a poetic rendering of the “present darkness”, all monotonous storms and war-ridden skies. Still, his message – bolstered by gospel choir, breakbeats, brass and that guitar solo – transcends the melee with its promise “Not to pacify you but, homie, to truly change.” It’s a powerful moment, the very currency Curtis Harding deals in throughout this stirring, seductive album.