Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Soul Time!
Release Date: Oct 31, 2011
Genre(s): R&B, Soul, Funk, Deep Funk Revival
Record label: Daptone
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Album Review: Soul Time! by Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Excellent, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
If you’ve seen soul revivalists Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings live in concert, you know one thing. Sharon Jones is not merely a performer, she is an entertainer – and one of the most consummate quality. A Sharon Jones concert is a transcendent experience, and she certainly knows how to milk expectation. In fact, she doesn’t walk out onto the stage until her band and backup singers have sufficiently warmed up the audience, and it actually takes about 20 minutes into the set before you get the main attraction.
Based on rating 4/5
With every album Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings release, the suspicion increases that the recordings might be superfluous to proceedings: that what really counts with this band is the blistering live show. Soul Time! feels like merchandise-stall fodder: stacks of tracks have been issued before, and even those making their first appearance on disc are far from new – most glaringly Longer and Stronger, written to celebrate Jones's 50th birthday in 2006. Then again, newness is a relative concept for a band trading in funk and soul licks patented decades ago, whose avowed aim is to party like it's 1969.
Opinion: Fantastic
Forty very happy minutes in SJDK’s discrete funk universe. Daryl Easlea 2011 Few acts have created their own universe as successfully as Brooklyn-based Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Forming in 1996, the band’s quest to create bona-fide funk-soul has long outlived their original critics’ view that the 10-piece band was merely some form of extended pastiche.
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