Hot Buttered Soul - EP (Remastered)

iTunes Review

Dionne Warwick’s 1964 version of the Bacharach-David ballad “Walk On By” was a masterpiece of control, with the singer’s pain tucked mostly between the lines. Five years later, Isaac Hayes cut it for Hot Buttered Soul, his second album and the one that made him a solo force after his time as a staff writer-musician at Stax Records (“Soul Man,” “Wrap It Up”). Hayes turned the song into a 12-minute epic of barely checked emotion, with Hammond organ, fuzztone guitar, strings and female vocals swimming in pools of echo. It stands as an audacity topped only by the record’s closer, a take on the then-recent “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” that spent the first half of its 18 minutes on elaborate spoken backstory that included the protagonist’s car model (a 1965 Ford). Whatever its relatively stripped-down instrumentation might have lacked, it made up for in sheer expansiveness. Hot Buttered Soul remains both a classic in itself and a pointer to Hayes’ later achievements.