Monday, October 16, 2023

Otis Redding - Tell The Truth LP (From Otis Forever: The Albums and Singles 1968 - 1970 Box Set)

Untitled

Rhino / ATCO (2023) 

For the next few weeks, on Mondays, I'm writing about individual albums in the Otis Forever: The Albums and Singles 1968 - 1970 box set. This is the second Otis Redding box set I have, but this one focuses on his posthumous albums. Otis has been a long time favorite of mine, and the opportunity to finally pick up nice copies of the albums released after he passed was one I was not going to pass up.

Tell The Truth is an album that I'm really not familiar with at all.  It's never been in my collection in any format and while I know a couple of the songs, this is like a new Otis Redding releases for me.  By the time we get to Tell The Truth, the fourth posthumous Otis Redding album, it's starting to become clear that they were digging a little deeper into the the vaults at this point.

That's not to say that this is a bad or even a lackluster record, but it is missing some of that uniformity that made the others sound like full albums.  Tell The Truth just sounds like a collection of songs, without the same type of cohesion from track to track taking you through the record.  That's not to say there aren't some incredible songs on here.  Otis had an incredible knack for composition and that man was a hit machine.  Not sure it would even be possible for him to write a bad song.

While this might not be the classic Otis record that some of his others may be, it's still a damn good record and finally having a nice sounding, pristine copy on vinyl is all I could really ask for.  We'll close up this box set review next Monday, with the double LP main event that is probably the main selling point of the whole box for me.

No comments:

Post a Comment