Today little goes undocumented in the music realm. Songs and ideas that in decades past would at most be demos or disregarded and forgotten make their way to listeners ears as bonus cuts, mixtape material or Internet-only randoms, in part because of the reduction in labor to produce the music and in part because of the warped business model that has begotten. In private conversations, I used to speculate that to be the reason for the abundance of sub-par material today; we hear music that is part of the artists' development process that maybe we shouldn't. If we heard the demos or unreleased material of artists from the past, they may not appear as titanic.
Numero Group kind of blew a hole in that little theory with last year's release of Love Apple's self-titled shelved debut from 1978. Well, to be exact, it's actually a rehearsal tape from 1978. The trio of Cleveland soul singers, under the auspice of Lou Ragland, cut this bare-bones tape as practice for their live shows. Life happened, things fell through, and nothing ever came of it, but now, more than 40 years later, we get to hear the tape, and goddamn is it great.
The songs sound especially somber with the sparse accompaniment; it's just three voices, drums, piano and a guitar. I guess even yesteryear's demos blow ours out of the water. The Numero Group sheds more light on the project:
"In the late '70s, three do-right women from Cleveland forged a brief partnership with Ohio's everything man, Lou Ragland. Unlike the prefabricated singing combos of the day, Lily Pearson, Annette Warren, and Avetta Henry swapped lead duties as situation demanded. When a Ragland-centric publicity stunt preempted a concert appearance, Love Apple disintegrated, abandoning this rehearsal tape at Thomas Boddie's cherished Eastside studio. Devoid of bass, the sparse instrumentation accentuates each vocalist's aptitude, showcasing some of Ragland's finest songwriting in the process."
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