"Wear It Like a Cape"

I've waited a long time to blog this song.

Back at the tail-end of the sixties, Country Joe MacDonald claimed to have invented something he called "rock and soul music" which was, to be frank, an amalgam of rock and soul. All well and good, and a fine sub-sub-sub-genre it was too. However, one day, while trawling through the radio station's record library during a stint as a DJ, I happened upon an album by the Del Fuegos called "Stand Up", and pretty much there and then the genre was completed re-invented for me.
This is proper soul music. In fact, you wouldn't credit four ugly white guys from Boston with coming up with a sound as downright soulful and funky as this. Nasty blasts of brass, one of those weird keyboards that sounds like it's being played underwater, a slow, sensual rhythm and a very dirty vocal. People called them garage rock, but they're about a million miles wide of the mark. There's real grass-roots soul at work here, a proper guitar- and bass-based groove but it's not quite rock either.
In fact, it's another one of those songs about sex, I suspect. I've already been through that here and here, and this is another take on the same thing, only ... only different. And maybe better: "Everybody needs someone/To help them get in the groove/Yes and I believe I found the one/Honey when I found you/Seems to be a reason why we try so hard/Try to keep it showing/In between the sheets we keep the heat/We keep it going." Like Aerosmith's "Pink", there's a salacious element and like the Eurythmics' "Regrets" there's the hint of something kinky going on, but unlike both of those, there's an emotion here too.
And as the song winds up, there's some utterly fantastic backing harmonies, a deep, deep baritone and some sharp female cat-calls from the back of the studio, just to bring Detroit a little closer to your bedroom. This is a song for a lazy Sunday in bed and out, a day when there's nothing more to do than get lost in each other.