At the Revival – The Mighty Clouds of Joy

The Mighty Clouds of Joy
At the Revival
EMI Gospel (release date: January 26, 2010)
www.emigospel.com

The Mighty Clouds of Joy have come full circle in the past half-century: from the raw-shouting Southern California quartet scene of the late 1950s to the funky-disco sound of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and back to their traditional roots in the new millenium.

Thank goodness.

I never could get into the group’s dalliance with disco-funk because it made them sound like everybody else – sacred and secular – and the heavy instrumentation all but drowned out their harmonies. Their new release, At the Revival, celebrates the group’s Golden Anniversary with the Clouds sound we know and love, anchored as always by Joe Ligon’s tough-as-nails lead vocals and the quartet’s muscular harmonies.

Their new album was produced by quartet enthusiasts Raphael Saadiq (Mary J. Blige, John Legend) and DeVante Swing (Al Green, Usher).

The Clouds could use a revival. They haven’t had it easy in the past couple of years. Members Michael Cook and Elmo Franklin went home to glory. And on “He’ll Fix It For You,” Ligon sings of an illness that gave him a 40 percent chance to live. But they say tribulation makes you stronger, and the quartet sounds more energized than ever. It is as if they adopted as their motto a line from the album’s “Hard Times”: “Hard times will come, hard times will go/At the end, Jesus will be a friend.”

There are a number of solid cuts on the album. Appropriately, the title track has an upbeat quartet drive tempo, with Ligon introducing the song in his characteristic preacher voice. “I’ll Be Up There” follows at a similar jog. The rootsy “Just Love Somebody” has what it takes to garner the kind of crossover appeal that Clarence Fountain and Sam Butler received for their recent radio single, “Between Darkness and the Light of Day.”

At the Revival is the best I’ve heard the Clouds sound in a long time. God bless them on their fiftieth anniversary.

Four of Five Stars

gPod Picks: “At the Revival,” “I’ll Be Up There,” “Just Love Somebody.”