Hall and Oates
Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall and John Oates
[Legacy; 2009]
4.8
Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala
What, exactly, is wrong about Daryl Hall and John Oates? It’s not a lack of talent– they’ve got a stellar singer (and a pretty good one), and their songs are smart and durable. They’re not particularly derivative, aside from their undying love for the Philadelphia soul scene that brought them together, and anyway it’s not as if there are many pop artists with a fixation on that particular sound. Hall’s a fascinating interview subject. But the pong of tackiness hovers around them, and this lovingly assembled, more-than-complete boxed set doesn’t dispel it.
The first disc begins with shruggable late-1960s singles by their individual teenage soul projects, the Temptones (Hall) and the Masters (Oates), then surveys the early albums on which Hall and Oates were a nearly hitless cult item (“She’s Gone” squeaked up to #60 on the pop charts on its initial release). It ends with five songs from a 1975 London concert, by which point they seem to have settled into being an agreeable, quirky soft-rock band with really nice harmonies and a taste for the smoother end of R&B.
On the second disc, though, both their gifts for tune and arrangement and their peculiar lapses of taste start to assert themselves. The heavy, daisy-chained hooks of “Gino (The Manager)” are ahead of their time– it wouldn’t sound far out of place on an A.C. Newman album– but it is, in fact, about their then-manager (Tommy Mottola!), and for this set, Hall has jarringly replaced the original recording’s drums and remixed it. “I Don’t Wanna Lose You” is an airy Philly disco pastiche with a great chorus, but Hall nearly sinks it with oversinging. Oates takes the lead for a totally unnecessary cover of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”. Perfectly nice grooves are defaced with curlicues of check-out-my-bulging-forehead-veins saxophone. Everything is bluntly in earnest. (Hall, in the liner notes, on “Wait for Me”: “It’s a true story. I was feeling a certain way. I sat down and wrote the song and there it is.” Well, that settles that.)
Their willingness to bend with the times worked out well for their career peak, the 1980-1985 period documented on Disc Three. Hall and Oates were never quite a new wave act, but new wave’s insistence on formal economy and freshness of sound were just the tonic they needed: “You Make My Dreams” appropriates Devo’s jerky rhythms in the service of yacht rock, and “Private Eyes” is essentially David Bowie’s “Fashion” with all the archness stripped out of it. “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”, their biggest hit, is everything they do best in one place: an ingeniously knotty melody, effortless starbursts of harmonies, Hall vamping freely, and an arrangement like nothing else on the radio. “One on One” builds a ballad around its percolating drum machine pretty much the same way. Then they discover the Mid-80s Massive Gated Snare Sound, fire off a few more good songs from within the chasm of the big bam boom, and wrap up their pre-separation career by trotting out David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick for an embarrassing Temptations medley on a live-at-the-Apollo album– the official jump of the shark.
The fourth disc, documenting everything from 1988’s way too optimistically titled reunion album Ooh Yeah! to the present, is one long comedown, chiefly because their songwriting mojo seems to have totally dried up around 1990. After a sampling of that year’s Change of Season album, we get one live track from a Japanese tour five years later, and then boom, it’s 2003, and as Oates puts it, “we were working with a team of English writers for the Do It for Love album,” and they’re covering Billy Paul and Mad Lads songs, and everything’s wrap-up and nostalgia and testimonial dinner. (There’s no sign of 1997’s Marigold Sky or 2004’s covers album Our Kind of Soul, or for that matter 2006’s Home for Christmas. Just as well, really.)
There’s about a disc’s worth of excellent pop sprinkled throughout this set– the same disc’s worth that makes up half of The Essential Daryl Hall and John Oates, in fact. Hall and Oates are one of the last long-running, big-name acts to get a boxed set, and listening to the thing suggests why: their hits are toweringly better than almost everything else here, and the “everything else” part doesn’t do much to illuminate the hits. They insist they’re still a going concern, but Do What You Want, Be What You Are feels like a gold watch– a pro forma reward for four decades of more or less reliable service.
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