Curtis Harding Face Your Fear LP

Curtis Harding could best be described as a student of the gritty, sweat-dripping, hip-swinging blues that wafted through the air of the American sixties.

The offspring of a mother who sang gospel, and a retired veteran, he traveled all over the country as a child, singing alongside his parents, learning that music was in fact the great communicator, and that the key was not just in how pretty the notes were, but how if you were honest in what you were singing, you could stir a person on the inside. This is what Otis Redding knew. What Sam Cooke, and Bo Diddley, and B. B. King knew. That somehow there was a way to take your experiences, your pain and joy, and give them melody, cause them to live and breathe and massage the hearts and minds of all those who hear. That is what Curtis Harding does on his 2017 album, Face Your Fear. He figures out how to tap into the old soul man of the past without mimicking or bastardizing it, but instead evoking the spirit of the true Soul music of yesterday, meshed with the realities of now.

With a little production help from his friends Sam Cohen and Danger Mouse, Curtis Harding has put together a collection of tunes that NME described as "soul-meets-garage pop perfection."

Curtis Harding's debut album, 2014's Soul Power, was a strikingly confident work that demonstrated he was one of the smartest and most gifted artists to emerge from the retro-soul scene, a vocalist and songwriter with a respect for the past and a vision of the future. It turns out Harding was just getting started; his second full-length, 2017's Face Your Fear, is an even more ambitious set of material, an exercise in psychedelic soul that feeds from a wide range of sounds and influences while still reflecting the mind and soul of Curtis Harding at every turn. While the production and arrangements on Face Your Fear are clearly informed by classic R&B and funk sounds of the '60s and '70s, along with the trippier edges of psychedelic soul, Harding and his studio collaborators never seem to be reaching for some sort of Northern soul completists mindset; instead, they use the evocative textures of vintage African-American music as a jumping-off point for Harding's heartfelt, street-smart tales of love, regret, family, and the pains and joys of everyday life. Harding is a terrific singer who can deliver full-bodied performances in his normal range (check out 'Need Your Love' and 'Go as You Are' if you need convincing) and also slip into a falsetto that's just the ticket for numbers like 'Ghost of You' and 'Dream Girl.' (He even lets the two play off one another on 'Till the End,' in which he portrays both halves of a combative couple.) Curtis Harding can write and sing like a soul man with a mind of his own, and here he sounds even more open, expressive, and fearless than he did on his very fine debut. Face Your Fear ups the ante for Harding, bumping him from promising newcomer to major artist, and if you like good songs played and sung with true conviction, you won't want to sleep on this.