With 15 million album sales and three Grammy Awards under his belt, you'd think it might be easy for Seal to make a successful album. Yet since the mid-1990s his popularity dramatically waned, with even the super contemporary Jacques Lu Cont produced System last year failing to make much of a mark.
Thus Seal has decided to return to his self-declared roots with his sixth album, the simply titled Soul - a collection of classic songs, produced by legendary Canadian producer David Foster, best known for his work with Celine Dion. Entirely a covers album, it features the work of Sam Cooke, Al Green, Otis Reading and James Brown to name but a few, and here enlies the problem. Choosing such definitive songs, and performing them, on the whole, with such a loyalty to the original recordings, simply makes us want to listen to those originals. Sure, there may be some novelty value the first time you hear a man sing Ann Peebles' glorious I Can't Stand The Rain or Deniece Williams' enchanting Free but a faithful cover of If You Don't Know Me By Now leaves us reaching for the Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes original, or at very worst Simply Red. Cover albums always face this risk, but Seal could have done with taking a leaf out of George Michael's Songs From The Last Century album and finding some brilliant, but lesser known songs to scatter through the album.
Though there's no doubt that Seal has a great voice, perfectly designed for singing soul music, ultimately Soul feels a touch too smooth. In his day Seal was an innovator - constantly pushing the genre boundaries of r 'n' b & dance music - but now we're left hoping he finds some of that magic that seems to have been lost along the way.
Originally published at BBC Music
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