Solomon Burke is an artist who deserves great songs and a band that rattles tooth fillings in the studio, not a polish fit for "new country" radio and adult-contemporary success. You do get a glimpse of the possibility inherent in a Solomon Burke acoustic country record with the track "What Makes Me Think I Was Right," where the man's throaty growl of a vocal brings eons of brutal experience to a classic country broken-hearts narrative. Overall, that promise is never quite fulfilled.
The involvement of Clapton is especially disappointing; this is a guy who can bring the heat, but instead shows up in his introspective acoustic bespectacled mode to provide a thin tune seemingly calculated directly toward adult contemporary station adds, quality be damned. If you've got any station in your locality that plays "the biggest hits of the eighties, nineties, and today," then it's possible you'll hear "Like a Fire" on it. I don't mean that as a compliment.
It's tough because part of it has to be that there's a certain type of record I would like to hear from Solomon Burke, and with that comes inevitable expectations. In that sense, it's not necessarily fair to judge Like a Fire based on its dissimilarity to the incendiary soul music that I know Burke is capable of delivering. I would like to hope that if there were a level of commitment to this material present on Like a Fire, I'd be on board, regardless of what I was hoping to hear.
All I know for sure is that Like a Fire for me commits the cardinal sin of a new album--it doesn't make me want to hear it again once it's over.
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