Review Summary: A great soul record with a timeless, peerless intro.
Let's get one thing straight -
Pieces of a Man doesn't even start until the third track. Don't get suckered in by the two before it.
The much-referenced "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a great song, worthy of its plaudits as a furious and funky call to arms and an important early touchstone for the emerging hip-hop subculture in America, both in its anti-establishment stance and its dizzying patchwork of cultural references. It creates a problem for this album, though, because what follows from "Lady Day & John Coltrane" to "The Prisoner" sounds nothing like it - so for logical, but entirely misguided reasons, Heron bridges between the single and the album proper with "Save the Children".
"Save The Children" is awful. It is sentimental, soppy, sub-"Heal The World" pap of the highest order. It's as if Heron thought "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was too intelligent, too angry, too damn
good, and went out of his way to make something dumb, limp-dicked, and crap to immediately make up for it. It has absolutely no business being on an album this good and this smart - it belongs on Michael Jackson's
Invincible, or on a compilation of Estonia's best ever Eurovision Song Contest entires. Not here. Anywhere but here.
But then the album proper kicks in - and it's very, very good. The last 8 songs on here all fall in line with the soul of the very early '70s - think a
Curtis that replaces an orchestra with a chamber band, or a
What's Going On that replaces head-in-the-clouds wistfulness with earthy indignation, or a
There's A Riot Goin' On without the drugs. It's smooth in its execution, but it's stern and solid in its message - "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", "Or Down You Fall", and "The Prisoner" being the finest examples of the latter. But there's also traces of hope - "Lady Day & John Coltrane" being a sensitive, deeply soulful song about the healing power of music.
Effectively, if you buy this album, you're getting a seriously solid soul record, with a single stuffed at the front that has a stunning A-side and an atrocious B-side. It's best to think of it in those terms, because if you take the last 8 tracks here as an album on their own, they stand up to anything Marvin or Sly put out during the same period, and I shouldn't need to tell you how impressive an endorsement that is.
