Soul music, according to people who chart such things, maps ecstatic gospel testimony onto postwar rhythm and blues. Vandross and Neville turn this equation around, mixing rhythm and blues with snootier, baroque pop styles. They are tender love men, crooners who patiently fuss over their ballads, rather than blow them out. They are almost archaic voices of masculine vulnerability, innocents at play in the fields of love.
“Power of Love,” Vandross’s first new album in three years (he released a compilation of hits in 1989), marks a long-due commercial breakthrough, his first crossover pop success after eight million-selling albums. But it is by no means his best. A little long on refined pop forms and short on backbeat, the new songs aren’t funky; they feel calcified.
His songs, though, aren’t much more than excuses for him to sing, and his voice remains little short of remarkable. Vandross caresses his words. They are his fetishes: plump, ripe, sensuous. Singing about love from afar, rarely from within the throes of passion, he cherishes the abstraction as a private obsession. On his best new song, “Power of Love/Love Power” (his second Top 10 pop single), he wades lightly, gently pushing his words in front of him as if looking for one he can pour himself into. When he finds one, he takes it for a smooth ride, improvising with the shape of the sound as much as with the pitch. Vandross builds a glass palace of unfulfilled love from such moments of absolute fulfillment.
Aaron Neville, 50, is a massive, crudely tattooed piece of work, with the voice of one of heaven’s nicer angels. In his fluttery falsetto, he sings as if trying to keep his pearly notes from escaping his mouth. Since his quavering 1966 ballad, “Tell It Like It Is,” and through his star turns with the rowdier Neville Brothers, his obsessive commitment to sensual beauty has been pure enough to suspend time.
“Warm Your Heart,” his first solo album in almost 30 years, spreads this obsession around, from Franz Schubert’s hymn “Ave Maria” and Randy Newman’s mythopoetic “Louisiana 1927” to Neville’s own “Angola Bound,” the plaint of a black man headed for hard time. Neville won two Grammy Awards for his duets with Linda Ronstadt on her 1989 “Cry Like a Rainstorm - Howl Like the Wind” album. Her production of Neville’s album, with George Massenburg, is almost neoclassical; she gives Neville the room to make eerie operettas of simple pop songs. It works. This luxuriates in pure sound more defiantly than any pop album since Roy Orbison’s parting “Mystery Girl.”
Vandross, raised on the diva recordings of Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and the Supremes, creates a sensuous world of romantic abstractions; Neville, raised on Sam Cooke, anchors his feathery nothings in hard specificity. Both carve sanctuaries from the messy rush of the modern world.
