Soul is coming back, Aloe Blacc is here

To find my online copy on http://www.freedomspark.co.uk/, click here

After many agonising hours listening to awful American R’n’B tracks constantly played on the radio, I can now breath easy as Aloe Blacc is here. He is a possible soundtrack to our summer; Blacc’s approach to American soul is refreshing and much needed in a music scene full of pop guitar bands and sleazy urban beats.

This Los Angeles based singer is already well known in the US with his most famous song, ‘I need a Dollar’, being the theme tune to the show, ‘How to Make it in America’. This song has been noted to be an anthem of financial strife which is obviously resonating heavily both in the US and in Britain. The lyrics highlight desperate times with lines such as “I don’t know if I’m walking on solid ground coz everything around me is falling down” and “I had a job but the boss man let me go, he said, I’m sorry but I won’t be needing your help no more”.

His music is sung from personal experience after losing his job as an analyst at a global company, but being raised in a family that he describes as having “absorbed enough pain and poverty for three generations so that I could be raised middle-class”. He continues to hold his own in other new tracks such as ‘You make me Smile’ and ‘Loving You is Killing Me’, in which the video features 4 year old Baby Boogaloo (real name Miles Brown), an amazing break dancer from the duo Future Funk who were discovered on the TV show, ‘America’s Got Talent’.

Blacc’s vocals also feature on label buddy Medaphoar’s (MED) track ‘Where you from’. They are both signed with Stones Throw records, a label that boasts other great American acts such as Madlib and Dudley Perkins. Whilst searching Blacc’s music online, you will find his slow bluesy version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ and other live tracks from his second album ‘Good Things’.

Aloe Blacc will be playing half of Europe before his 6 dates in the UK, including a show at Scala, London on the 1^st May and Somerset House on 10^th July. To find out more about this rising star, go to his website.