As the sleeve-notes freely confess, compilations featuring sassy soul sisters are hardly a new concept but this Stateside compilation mercifully leaves out all the usual tampon-rattling sister statements you’d naturally expect. There’s no sign of Aretha Franklin’s penis-lopping ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T’, no sign of the Weather Girls, no ‘Sisters Doing It For Themselves’ nonsense, just all the husky, earthy, uplifting sixties soul joy that labels like Blue Note, Liberty, Veep and Roulette heaped upon us in sweet delicious spoonfuls back in the day. It’s still fairly liberating, boy bashing stuff occasionally, of course: Anna King’s ‘Mama’s Got A Bag Of Her Own, Dee Dee Warwick’s ‘You’re No Good’, but the emphasis is more upon the issues and the love-matter that defines the fairer-sex. It’s an altogether different kind of empowerment, and one that includes such horny, restless chills as Debbie Dovale’s ‘I’m My Own Doctor’, and Irma’s Thomas’s heel clicking pleasure, ‘Some Things You Never Get Used To’.
It’s a tale of identity, isolation, consolation, and remonstrating self-defence sweetened with the most satisfying of pills. Even the boys are likely to enjoy getting one over on the boys with this album.
A punchy introduction to the whole, manacle-shedding genre.