Sly & the Family Stone, Fresh

This album fits, in my memory, into that broad category of music I wanted to like, but just couldn't quite back when I initially bought it.  It reminds me of when I was little, and my mother used to feed me some combination of things, like peanut butter & jelly, and when I looked forlornly at her, she'd say, "What?  You like peanut butter.  You like jelly.  This is just both of them together."  This argument seemed flawed - I like pasta and I like coffee ice cream, but I wouldn't like them together - but who was I to put forth a cogent response like that when I was five or six and my mother was my mother?  

In any event, you look at an album like Fresh, and it seems like the elemental components - joyous and fabulously dressed lead singer, funk and soul - ought to have enticed me more than their sum did.  For a while, the only song I liked on this was "If You Want Me to Stay," which I liked because it seemed less repetitive than a lot of the other efforts here.  The problem, I think, is this: the Family Stone seems to imply a rotating cast of aunts, uncles, second cousins, some other distant relative who might not even be authentic but who can apparently play the theremin.  It doesn't imply any structure, coherence, or personality, so the songs all kind of sound the same.  Sly sings androgynously, the music sets itself in a vamp, Sly starts making up words, and I found myself sighing with indifference at the point of it all.

The horns, though.  The horns rescue the music.  I'm a sucker for horns in pop and soul music — it's the secret reason why early Michael Jackson music is so good, and it's the salvation of Fresh.  The second half of the album exceeds the first, mostly because Sly's got some great horn riffs in there and the songs have more of a churchy feel to them, as though Sly and the Family Stone were performing for a congregation rather than an audience.  "Que Sera Sera" is particularly moving in that regard.  

Fresh doesn't knock Dulcinea off its pedestal, but I give it its due — it's better than I'd thought it was.