Gamble Brothers Band – Continuator
Memphis’ Gamble Brothers Band plays sunny pop music tricked out with silly-putty melodies and blue-eyed soulful touches of B3 and horns. The group’s chops and grooves, which are not only keyboard-driven but altogether guitar-less, have a good deal more to say than its thin vocals and fuzzy words. But that’s enough.
Continuator is their third disc, and now and again the Brothers’ words this time around are memorable and to the point. “If one memory is all I get,” Al Gamble wagers in “Heart’s Not In It”, “I’d trade it in for a chance to forget what you did.” Other times the lyrics are so incoherent as to be irrelevant, or, more often, so perfectly medial to the mix as to mostly pass without registering. It’s only on the sparely arranged “Vinyl” that we can hear Gamble’s weak-lunged but pleasing voice well enough to catch the nuance that’s actually there.
That’s slightly a shame, too, because, on more than a few cuts, singing along would be just the ticket. For example, “Overboard”, the effervescent album-opener, sounds tailor-made to crank in the car come first day of spring, though I’m still not sure exactly what its metaphor is trying to accomplish.
Also strong is “Durty Walt”, which starts out with an interpolation of the keyboard lick from “Eminence Front”, then explodes into the funkiest Tower Of Power cut you’ve ever heard. It’s an instrumental, so you can make up your own words.