Consumer Guide Album

Motel Lovers [Trikont, 2007]
I'm too far away to judge how vital this particular chitlin' circuit is. But I trust the money-where-her-mouth-is of 66-year-old Barbara Carr, who quit her factory job of 20 years and returned to music full-time in the wake of regional hits "Footprints on the Ceiling" and "Bone Me Like You Own Me." Presumably not all current Southern soul records stick to explicit adulterous sex, Friday-night hustles and the circuit itself. But I bet a lot of them do--enough for Munich-based Trikont to top its two '60s Black & Proud collections with these 18 contemporary songs. Young Sheba Potts-Wright furrows her own groove as she counsels coital subtlety. So does Johnnie Taylor's son Floyd analyzing his woman's failure to bring him his house shoes. Big Cynthia's matched demands for clitoral and vaginal stimulation and Denise LaSalle's Anita Hill-era "Long Dong Silver" are good cheap novelties. And standing tallest of all is a standstill ballad by Carr, who is pained to admit that her macho man is also a "Down Low Brother." A-