This latest from Booker T is a pleasant enough mix of the contemporary and what one expects from a previous sound. Opening title track Sound the Alarm is ‘modern’ in its opening electronics/sampling, though the soulful pop of the melody is relatively timeless in being quite simply catchy - bright vocals provided by Mayer Hawthorne. Second All Over the Place is similarly of the moment, though again rather generic as a mildly funky, soul number, the orchestrations launching it like a film score and Booker T’s organ grooves take a supporting role to the Vandrossesque vocals of Luke James. Not surprisingly, it’s the first instrumental, third Fun, that features the organ stabs one will have expected, horns and soulful chorus as a familiar backdrop too. Fourth Broken Heart is again more vocal soul with organ as accompaniment, Jay James giving an Al Green feel to the song. Fifth Feel Good is probably the most mixed with its contemporary injections of what sounds like a sampled vocal ‘oh’ [a gesture?] and then the organ instrumentation. This is what it is really: pleasant, mainly nu-soul, and Booker T’s trademark organ in the background and occasionally to the fore. Stand-out track is the penultimate Your Love Is No Love with the outstanding vocal of Vintage Trouble’s Ty Taylor. The album closes on a clear Booker T stamp, a father and son Ted Jones duet aptly if not imaginatively titled Father Son Blues, and that perhaps sums up this album: straightforward, professional, familiar, but no houses ignited.
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