Goapele - "Good Love"


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There are a few Sa-Ra productions on the new Goapele album (which Columbia dumped between Christmas Day '05 and New Year's Day '06, otherwise known as the one-year anniversary of the Columbia-released Get Lifted). None of them are knockouts, but one could qualify as a half nelson and another is sort of like a rabbit punch. (At the top of the barometer is "Glorious," a donkey punch.) Signifying Sa-Ra's potential for crossover, each one of the three tracks in question was slapped into the latter half of the disc's sequence. "Battle of the Heart" is an off-the-cuff wisp. The winsome "Fly Away" is the most sober and sunny Sa-Ra thing I've heard (granted, I've not given a lot of attention to the unreleased CDRs). "Good Love," the best of the three and the rabbit punch, is also the most Sa-Ra-like: the spaced-out stutter-bass, the tipsy keyboard played by one finger, the searing synthesizer played by one or two hands, and -- surprise! -- the laggard handclaps. Goapele's vocals, typically finding a way to be demonstrative and barely there at the same time, sometimes sound as if they could've been recorded while she was hanging upside-down from a tree. (Actually, as I was just listening to this song for the third straight time, the vocal refrains from "Fly Away" kept sneaking into my head in a pleasurable way, so maybe I like that one more.)