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CALLING OUT OF CONTEXT
(Audika)
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Yes, this is the same Arthur Russell, a cellist and "disco visionary," who in 1979 cooked up Loose Joints’ intoxicated "Is It All over My Face?", the disco era’s equivalent of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s "I Put a Spell on You." Russell died in 1992, having also contributed Dinosaur L’s cool-stomping "Go Bang! #4" to disco in the 1980s, and leaving what Audika’s Steve Knutson calls "over 1000 tapes of various configurations." The 12 tracks released here belong to the more accessible portion of that œuvre, being taken from the 1985 album Corn and an abandoned album recorded between 1986 and 1990. The listener will not be disappointed. Like most pop musicians, Russell takes love as his theme. What’s different is that his music actually caresses you; his rhythms, percussion, and noise effects sway, tickle, excite, and rub up against you; his singing — sweet, baritone, and intimate — forecasts all the soulful attributes that house music’s male vocalists would come up with. Russell died long before the coming of age of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but the term and its æsthetics sum up his approach to lovemaking and singing about it. Sweet-beat tracks like "The Platform on the Ocean," "Arm Around You," "That’s Us/Wild Combination" (a duet with Jennifer Warnes), and "Make 1" convey all the vocal perfume, melodic gloss, and rhythmic shoeshine that queer eye, as a true son of the disco age, has brought to current pop music. His lyrics too — most notably in "Get Around to It" and the title song — treat love as a mystery to be enjoyed, delicately, one surprise at a time. An added treat is "Calling All Kids," disco-mixed by the late Walter Gibbons, himself a 1970s disco legend.
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