Transformer man

As his sound gradually evolves, the screaming eagle of soul goes to his quiet place. Geoff Brown joins him there.

CHARLES BRADLEY, 67, now three albums into a late-blooming career as rafter-raising soul brother, knows all about changes. Since shrugging off his James Brown tribute artist cloak – hesitantly, suspiciously, reluctantly – to become his own man, his music and style has steadily revealed itself and now, after 2011’s man-in-a-hurry No Time For Dreaming and 2013’s consolidating Victim Of Love, Changes finds the explosive R&B shouter, dubbed ‘the screaming eagle of soul’, often exploring softer sides of his vocal armoury, calling on a tone and expression he has not exactly overused in the past. That’s not to say he and the Menahan Street and Budos bands and assorted backing troupes do not let the funk flow at full spate – there are at least two terrific uptempo funk fliers on Changes, as we have come to expect from the Daptone collective. But as No Time For Dreaming’s bright palette of the late-’60s primaries moved into subtler early-’70s shades on Victim Of Love, so Changes refines the Bradley soul sound again. Given the hand that life in general and the USA in particular has dealt Charles [see MOJO 239, October 2013], it takes some moxie to open with God Bless America, but after his preamble as “A brother that came from the hard licks of life,” Bradley gives the hymn to his country a generous interpretation. Then, “I’m home!” he yells before powering into the supercharged groove of Good To Be Back Home, driven by unstoppable James Brown ’70s funk. There’s more spine-snapping funk midway through the album, Ain’t It A Sin’s tightly locked guitar/bass/drums urging Bradley on: “I’ve tried to be a righteous man,” he insists, but now is close to the end of his tether: “If you ain’t gonna do me right, I might just do you in…” Ain’t It A Sin follows the title track, a cover of that rarest of rarities – a Black Sabbath ballad. Uncommonly restrained, in Bradley’s care the 1972 song, which he first released as a single back in 2013, becomes about the challenges of life and about his mother, as against a comforting organ and washes of horns, he makes it his own. Elsewhere, melodic touches lift the mid-tempo Things We Do For Love, the ballad Crazy For You