Aaron Frazer - "Into the blue": Soul traditionalist employs samples and hip-hop beats...

...to fine modern retro effect

    Great singing drummers rarely stay behind the kit forever. Such was the case with Aaron Frazer, the sticksman whose standout lead vocal turn on Indiana soul revivalists Du­rand Jones & The Indications’ self-titled 2016 debut album, the showstopping ’60s-fashioned ballad Is It Any Wonder?, first brought his dreamy Smokey Robinson falsetto into the spotlight. A solo album, Introducing..., perhaps inevitably followed in 2021, produced by Dan Auerbach and toeing the retro line from the ’60s into the ’70s political soul of Marvin and Curtis.

As a Baltimore-born child of the 1990s, however, Frazer was a hip-hop head at first, absorbing the beats on albums by Nas and The Roots that informed his drumming from the age of nine. On this second solo record, he returns to mine that inspirational seam once again, in cahoots with co-producer Alex Goose (Freddie Gibbs/Madlib). Fly Away even samples the 1992 song of the same name by Texan R&B boy band Hi-Five and re-imagines it with a boom bap beat and slip-and-slide vocal delivery closer to D’Angelo.

Into The Blue is still a record rooted in soul traditions: Payback is a talc-on-the-dancefloor Wigan Casino groover in which the singer frets about his own karmic debt; Perfect Strangers, with its snaking guitar line and doo wop vocal harmonies, sounds like it’s being sung on a Brooklyn street corner in 1959.

But also Frazer is clearly in tune here with those gently pushing the genre forward sonically. Inflo’s trademark vocal production techniques for Michael Kiwanuka and Sault — thinning out melodic figures to reverby, 78 rpm effect — clearly provide the inspiration for the haunting hooks of I Don’t Wanna Stay, before the track soars into celestially-voiced passages reminis­cent of the grand orchestral designs of David Axelrod. Similarly, the bedrock of The Fool sounds as if it could have been a rehearsal room jam round Sault’s studio, before Frazer invokes the spirit of The Delfonics.

Frazer says that this record was made af­ter a painful break-up and a relocation from New York to California. The hypnotic title track documents his trip driving west, like the soundtrack to a heat haze montage in an early-’70s road movie, with just a hint of Morricone in the strings to open up the desert vista. Elsewhere, Dime is a cooing and earwormy English/Spanish pop duet with Chilean singer/ drummer Cancamusa (and so clearly a kindred soul) and Easy To Love brings gospel vibes to a glittering disco groove a la Gabriels. Time Will Tell, meanwhile, zaps the listener into a tantalising alternate reality where Smokey made a record with Steely Dan in ’72.

Ultimately, by stylistically venturing back and forth in time, Aaron Frazer has struck gold with Into The Blue, a multifaceted soul album that blurs the past, the present and the possibilities of the future.