DUSTY IN MEMPHIS IS BRILLIANT

The truth is that this new album, recorded in Memphis last year [1968] under Atlantic chief Jerry Wexler's deft touch, knocks everything else [Dusty's] done completely in the shade. It makes one think that in the past, she has, perhaps, had much too much control over her own recordings and she is better when she is a tiny bit in awe of everyone about her. As indeed she was when faced with young energetic musicians of Memphis and the combined forces of the famous Atlantic production team.

What has emerged from this combined effort is simply brilliant.

It brings us a new Dusty. And one is thankful for it. The voice was getting just a bit too heavy, a bit too hard, so that songs hardly stood up in their own right and the arrangements and production tended to be exactly what you'd expect.

Past Dusty albums have always been good but never ever surprising. On Dusty in Memphis she has a new light, refreshingly young voice, a new approach, a new feel. It's almost as though that tired blood has had a re-charge. Memphis has brought spring. into her voice and has directed her career into a whole new way.

The songs are all from favourite composers Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, Bacharach and Randy Newman. But there is a whole new attitude towards them from Dusty and from the people who worked with her. For once you could sit and listen to this album a hundred times and still find something new about the entire package.

What helps towards this effect, more than anything else, is the astounding arrangements. Strings, guitar, drums, brass get almost suspended, then dive down, float away and do incredible things. The magicians of Atlantic have worked their spell.

You'll never have heard "Just One Smile" till you hear it on this, and every single track is a perfect little masterpiece. If ever there was a history-making album in one girl's career-this is it.


Author and publication unknown.


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