This month Elemental Music continues its Motown vinyl reissue campaign it began back in May by releasing three pivotal albums from three pivotal artists. The label's most enduring male vocal group makes their debut. The label's superstar female vocal group undergo an image change. The label's pioneer innovator starts winding down his original pop hitmaker phase and gets his first number one pop hit.
First up is Meet the Temptations, the album that kicked off with "The Way You Do the Things You Do", the hit that established the Temps and remained one of their signature recordings. Nothing else on the album is nearly as familiar but there are still some other fine showcases for the quintet's vocal interplay ("I Want a Love I Can See"), Eddie Kendricks's crystalline tenor ("Dream Come True"), Melvin Franklin's basso profundo ("Paradise"), and Paul Williams's velvet baritone ("The Further You Look, The Less You See"). There's a bit of a preponderance of cha-cha rhythms, and the material doesn't yet have the teeth that would make later albums like Gettin' Ready and With a Lot O' Soul so powerful, but as an introduction to five marvelous voices, Meet the Temptations delivers.
Actually, the hit title track's expression of shame for being a child born out of wedlock, feels kind of silly, almost comically reactionary, and utterly dated. Its sub-theme of poverty still connects, though, and "Love Child" is an undeniably dynamic piece of music. Its melodrama doesn't explicitly continue throughout the rest of Love Child (the tantalizingly vague "Does Your Mama Know About Me", co-written by Tommy Chong [!], may or may not be about an interracial relationship), but the somewhat grim tone does in the deliciously paranoid "Keep an Eye", the jilted "How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone", and the sincerely depressed "Some Things You Never Get Used To". Much of the rest of the material is cheerier (and in the case of "Honey Bee" and "He's My Sonny Boy", downright daffy), but sophisticated arrangements saturate the album, which is The Supreme's most consistently fine since the great Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland.
The fact that it does not rely at all on familiar material also makes Love Child feel unusually progressive for a sixties Motown LP. Marvin Gaye wasn't quite there yet when he released In the Groove just a few months before Love Child. His soon-to-expire willingness to rerecord others' hits fills out the record with good but hardly definitive versions of The Drifters' "Some Kind of Wonderful" and "There Goes My Baby" and The Four Tops' "Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever". Gladys Knight and the Pips had not yet released their frantic hit version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" when In the Groove came out in late-summer of '68, but after they did, Motown honcho Berry Gordy unleashed a single featuring Gaye's sinister take, which became the Motown empire's biggest hit and the definitive version of that oft-recorded song. Its presence essentially made In the Groove essential, although the minor-hits "You" and "Chained" and Ashford and Simpson's "Tear It Down" are top-tier too. Sure, it isn't as groundbreaking as What's Going On would be, but In the Groove is quite a wonderful little album in its own right.
For Elemental's new vinyl presentations, all three records arrive on 140 gram, virgin vinyl, with Meet The Temptations in its mono mix. The albums are all flat and noise-free. The music is vibrant, crisp, and punchy.
