For 1973’s
The Sylvers II, L.A. pop soul family band The Sylvers took the woozy orchestral elaborations and group vocals of 1972’s solid self-titled debut (source of the sample from J Dilla’s “Two Can Win”) and turned them up laterally, everywhere, weaving a tapestry of closely-mic’d drums, vivid strings and horns, and complex harmonic vocal movements that at its best sounds like itself an autonomous idea for a new kind of sonic beauty.
I think of
Pet Sounds when I think of musical creations whose innovations in consonance seem so tied to primordial synaptic bursts as to seem like a pure act of spontaneous generation, and sometimes the awe-inspiring density of
The Sylvers II seems to earn comparison to the greats of kitchen-sink recording: opener “We Can Make It If We Try,” which pops and crackles on its way to a whole-family promise toward progress, is somewhat apposite to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” in its relentless forward motion. Drums patter at 160BPM, a guitar scratches out a major-minor sequence, and warmth emanates and accumulates as musical elements are added (a delicious wordless background vocal coo starting Verse #2, say) or modified.
The Sylvers II bursts with such wonderful ideas. Take the groovy and corny “Cry of a Dreamer,” which provides at least two all-time hip-hop sample opportunities due to the boom and flow of disarmingly upfront orchestral elements—the woe-is-me/him/you “Nowhere Man”-like tone of “Cry” might grate were it not for the utterly believable and tangible wave of fervent, melodramatic emotion from the sounds, including a damn flute. Late-album highlight “I Remember,” too, is stunning, brandishing a suspended chord on the family chant of the title phrase that feels profound, modern, suspenseful, ecstatic, strings, upfront drums, and overall delectable production again guiding the song to paradise.
Where
The Sylvers was a solid album shot through with signs of a great one,
The Sylvers II is often a great album shot through with signs of a troubled one, including a couple instances where the corn goes too far (perhaps “Through the Love in My Heart” in particular), as well as a bunk a cappella cover of “Yesterday” as the damn closer. The Sylvers were excellent songwriters sometimes, adventurous and righteous arrangers always; their mistakes as curators of their own material can easily be forgiven in light of the wide-eyed wonder elicited by their best songs. Intense and spectacular if sometimes weighted by the aesthetic distraction of being supremely sentimental,
The Sylvers is ultimately a beautiful manifestation of the marriage of soul, pop, and studio experimentation in the early 1970s.
