Pitchfork

If somebody's going to make some money from an album that sounds like this, it might as well be Al Green himself. The Greatest Living Soul Singer is 62 years old now, and age has thickened his voice, but miraculously hasn't damaged it much; he's still got immaculate power and control, all the way up to that extraordinary falsetto. In fact, he sounds better this time than on his last few albums: less short of breath, getting texture out of the slighty worn patches in his range instead of trying to cover them up with shouting (aside from the throwaway closer "Standing in the Rain"). The production team (and half of the band) is the Roots' Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson and James Poyser, who manage to evoke the supple groove of Green's early-70s collaborations with producer Willie Mitchell more precisely than Mitchell himself did on 2003's I Can't Stop and 2005's Everything's OK. The arrangements, the mix, Poyser's Hammond organ tone, ?uest's drumming, the string sweetening-- everything is pure second-term-Nixon sound. (The horn section is the Dap-Kings Horns, who may be the only people who've maintained that particular tradition.) Even the major-minor changeups in a bunch of the songs are the same trick Green and Mitchell pulled off on songs like "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)".

So be it: the great Al Green records all sound like this, and the less great ones don't, so by inference making an Al Green record that evokes 1973 gives it a better shot. Put it on in the background and it's as gorgeous as Let's Stay Together or Livin' for You. But there's something unsettlingly nostalgic and hollow about Lay It Down that comes to the surface when you listen closely to it. The problem isn't just that there's no sign that hip-hop ever happened, aside from ?uestlove's breakbeat-inflected drumming in "You've Got the Love I Need" and the slightly Fugees-oid groove of "Stay With Me (By the Sea)". Despite the guest shots by Green disciples Anthony Hamilton and John Legend, both of whom get shown up by the master, this isn't a neo-soul record, it's a straight old-school soul record.

The hole in the middle of the album is, in fact, Jesus-shaped. Green's Christianity was always an enormous presence in his music, even before he gave up secular singing for a while; his constant awareness of mortality and divinity is what raised the stakes on his love songs. His best album, Call Me, followed "You Ought to Be With Me" with "Jesus Is Waiting", and the ever-present tension between the sacred and the secular on his records came to a head on 1977's "Belle": "It's you that I want, but it's Him that I need".

There's none of that here-- the closest Green comes is singing about "a love divine" on "Too Much", and he doesn't really mean "divine." Instead, we get flabby romantic couplets ("You're the best thing I ever had/ Losing you, that would make me feel so bad"; "Your love is more than true, oh baby/ It's just, it's just for me and you"). There's no desire here for a person (or a God) that Green wants to bring closer to himself, just an appreciation of someone he's already got. Yes, it's a pleasure to hear Green articulate romantic satisfaction, and good for him if he's satisfied. But the grain and pull of his voice is all about longing for both flesh and spirit, and it doesn't quite fit here. Green's classic records were never just baby-making music, and without a context greater than a shared bedroom, this precise reconstruction of their sound is a ritual that's lost a lot of its meaning.