Marc Broussard – S.O.S.: Save Our Soul / Tab Benoit With Louisiana’s Leroux – Power Of The Pontchartrain
Archive
Posted On June 1, 2007
Life should be easy for the young, handsome and talented, but it’s not as simple as you’d think. In 2004, Marc Broussard released Carencro on Island Records, seemingly poised to be a contender in the post-Dave Matthews acoustic-rock derby. Its most powerful song was “Rocksteady”, which sounded like a forgotten Motown hit. Stardom didn’t happen, and now he and his soulful pipes are on Vanguard Records. The question: What do you do with them? He made S.O.S.: Save Our Soul, an album of R&B covers.
Joss Stone’s The Soul Sessions used semi-obscure covers to start to create a persona, and the lesser-known songs here, such as “You Met Your Match” and “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know”, sound like they could express Broussard’s thoughts and passions. On classics including “Love And Happiness” and “Express Yourself”, he can’t help but mimic the original artists, and it’s only in the vamps at the end of songs that his voice takes center stage. S.O.S. certainly works as a tribute to soul, marking Broussard as a young classicist. It’s also a good sign that his “Come In From The Cold” is the most compelling moment on the album.
Fellow Louisianan Tab Benoit also was once similarly young, handsome and a bit of a blank slate, but aging has been good for him. His guitar playing has become woodier and more lyrical, his voice more urgent, and he has chosen and written blues songs that speak for him. Buddy & Julie Miller’s “Shelter Me” is more than a plea for spiritual help in Benoit’s hands because it’s impossible to hear pleas for help in Louisiana without evoking hurricane devastation. Katrina is the unspoken context of almost all music made in the region, and Benoit’s funky, angry cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” becomes a plea for witnesses to the poor federal response to the storm.
Power Of The Pontchartrain isn’t all specifically rooted in the region, and it isn’t all equally successful — the title song about a mythical spirit is forced — but it does show an artist who has comfortably made his genre his starting place, not his finish line.
