600 Barry White - Can’t Get Enough (1974)

Studio Album - Soul

About the Act:

Barry White was affectionately known in the UK as "The Walrus of Love". He was big and hairy. He is best known as a Soul singer who had success in the 70s and 80s, but before that he was a successful songwriter, producer and arranger. He did the writing and producing for a girl band called "Love Unlimited", and for them created an orchestra (The Love Unlimited Orchestra) who became his backing band as a solo artist. He had decided he wanted to work with a solo male singer, and recorded some demos. An industry friend persuaded him to record them himself, but it took some persuasion. Barry is well-known for his deep voice and for singing almost exclusively about love, romance and seduction. He died of weight-related health issues in 2003.

About the Album:

This was Barry's third solo studio album, and sold very well.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

I'm going to tell you something that I find interesting about voices, that I learned many years ago. It starts with sound in general. When you play a note on an instrument, what you hear is actually a mixture of notes of different frequencies. The lowest one of those is called the root and is usually the loudest, and the rest are called harmonics. Different variations in the strength of these harmonics are part of how different instruments sound different. Now, applying this to singing, it's just the same. When you sing different vowel on the same note, you are changing the makeup of the harmonics. Voices also have an overall characteristic with the nature of the harmonics that are made in the throat (which are then emphasised or de-emphasised in the nose and mouth cavities to make different vowel sounds). Our perception of whether a voice is "high" or "low" can be fooled by the nature of these harmonics. Alison Moyet, for example, is reputed to have a low voice, but she doesn't actually sing that low, she just has strong low harmonics in her voice, and fewer high harmonics.

The point of this is to draw attention to Barry White's voice. When he sings, it's not actually very low at all, but he has a voice that is extreme in the low harmonics, giving it a very low sound. I can sing the same notes as he does (and quite a bit lower) but my voice, despite having a low range, doesn't sound very low because it has lots of those high harmonics in it.

However, when he speaks, he does so very low, actually low in a rich bass rumble.

Onto the album. This is an album of soul-like love songs. The music is drenched in strings, and very slushy. The rhythm section are strong, and there seems to be a harpsichord, or at least a sound like a harpsichord. It's not really dancy, unless for the slow, slushy numbers.

The songs are without exception romantic songs, mostly about the devotion of the singer to a woman, expressed in different ways. This is a great marketing strategy, as for many years men have been using Barry White songs to express their love and devotion to women. He's basically providing a service.

There is a seemingly inviable pattern, where he starts with speaking, explaining his feelings, and then goes on to singing about them. Sometimes he comes back to speaking. 

In my youth, Barry White was considered a joke, especially by us kids who were not impressed by the slushy romance. He was a bit of a cliché, and Lenny Henry's character Theopholis P. Wildebeest is almost certainly based on him. The thing was, he (Barry) sold a LOT of records and was very successful, he found a niche in the market and cornered it.

Actually, I quite enjoyed listening to it. Musically, it's very produced but is decent, actually, and I especially liked the 10-minute-long "I Can't Believe You Love Me". There are two classic singles here that I know too, and once you buy into the Barry White premise, it's quite nicely executed.

7.2/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/42Si9RbdXYGWQsfNTzjlnG

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBySLT4o-5cWAWfTkAVqXwPug-aLJB-oP

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can%27t_Get_Enough_(Barry_White_album)