Lamont Dozier
Right There
Album Review
Record Label: Castle Music America
Released: 2001
Album Review
In the past, particularly on his Invictus/ABC albums, Lamont Dozier has been a more than adequate interpreter of his own material, with a vocal approach reminiscent of Johnnie Taylor's, though grainier. Those songs were inevitably extensions of his Motown production style of the Sixties: smart hooks, catchy melodies, intense singing. Unfortunately, on Right There, Dozier has replaced many of those appealing rough edges with a refined disco sound and genteel crooning.
Though the arranger on rhythms here is McKinley Jackson, Dozier's longtime partner, the charts are neither as ambitious nor as compelling as their earlier collaborations; they've been constructed with too close an ear for current disco gloss. None of the new songs is as grabbing as Dozier's recent writing for Margie Joseph ("Hear the Words") or the Originals ("Good Lovin' Is Just a Dime Away"). That's why a midtempo reworking of the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song" figures so prominently here. A welcome exception is the snappy, hard-driving "Joy," whose impassioned vocal harks back to Dozier's earlier work. (RS 221)
JOE MCEWEN
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