Customer Reviews

Why Can't We Live Together

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What can you say..."Why Can't We Live Together" is just as powerful as Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On" and just as beautiful and relevant today as when it was released in the mid-70's. For people who love this sound I would also highly recommend cd's by Willie (Little Beaver) Hale, Benny Latimore, and George McRae...all stablemates of Timmy Thomas and all of their greatest hits are still available. In fact the studio band at the time included T.T. on organ, Latimore on piano and Little Beaver on guitar and an unknown Jaco Pastorius on bass! All of these sessions were recorded in a little over a year and a half and capture a sound that seems timeless now...
I love this music.There's no nostalgia, just beauty.

As a vinyl records colllector i must add few words first. I don't often recommend buying a CD, but in that case i must give up. Timmy Thomas "Why can't we live together" is a powerful masterpiece which sould be found in every soul music listener collection. What a great touch, from the bottom of his deepened heart, with great vibrations of the organ, and a warm percussion, who should want to have more. It's such a shame that this kind of music cannot be found or created nowadays. After the first listening to this CD you won't take it out of the CD player, i can assure you this. I hope that after your first try, you'll know if there's a chance that "We could live together" happily after. Buy it now, you won't regret it.

My one-star rating reflects the quality of this album's transfer to CD, NOT the quality of the album itself, which is excellent. Collectables seems to have used a master tape several generations removed from the original, and a damaged master, at that. So, in addition to plenty of tape hiss, we get a song ("Funky Me") that ping-pongs back and forth across the stereo with another song superimposed over it, backwards, on the left channel. This disc is the reason why I'm wary of Collectables' CDs.

If you were in ten yards of an AM radio in the early 1970s, you know Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together."

Great a song as that was, this album is a classic for three other reasons: Thomas, his organ, and his organ's rhythm box. That is what most of this album is composed of, and it sounds like a sketchbook for modern dance music and trip-hop. Thomas' production here may sound primitive, and is by 2011 standards. But his use of the pulsating, robotic organ drum sound is incredibly modern, inventive, and hypnotic. Only Sly Stone on There's a Riot Goin On so inventively.

With some updated production and layering here, you'd think you're listening to Tricky or Portishead. Its impossible to put this album in a time machine, but the tracks here are well written, and the infant electronic concepts Thomas uses makes this album essential.

in light of the recent attack on new york and d.c., i need such music as this. why CAN'T we live together?...

While the title tune is a classic R&B classic, the other songs on the CD seem to be the ramblins of the songwriter.