Paak, seeming to portray the same character interchangeably, take turns out front and tactfully swap places. And at least some of the fun here comes from watching two charismatic leads who have undeniable chemistry make something out of their shared obsession. Paak are diligent, talented students of their subject, and the result is polished and pleasurable, even if it isn’t imaginative or bracing.
“An Evening with Silk Sonic” isn’t much more than a carefully designed simulacrum, but it’s a low-stakes achievement nonetheless. Paak released his sophomore album, “Malibu,” showcasing his textured voice, which easily transitions from singsong cadences to lyrical verse. Paak was coming into his own, imbuing timeless funk tunes with a rap sensibility. (There’s an impulse to mark his 2014 boogie collaboration with Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk,” as the waypoint delineating his pop past from his funk future, but watch his performance of the funk-pop ditty “Treasure” at the Billboard Music Awards, in 2013, and it becomes clear that the genre was always an undercurrent in his music.) While Mars made his soul transformation. After devising some of the biggest hits of the twenty-tens, Mars, a pop polyglot famous for his histrionic ballads, made a definitive move toward the finesse of retro R. Neither artist is a stranger to these sounds. Projects this reliant on nostalgia rarely stand up on their own, but that doesn’t mean the record’s feel-good charms and technical flourishes can’t be appreciated for what they are: well-intentioned restorations of a form that doesn’t need much updating. (Mars, for his part, plays electric guitar, conga drums, and even the sitar.) This is a dutiful homage, down to the last detail: Silk Sonic equipped its instrumentalists with the specific drum skins, guitar pics, and gauged strings that would recreate the seventies sound, duplicated “old-school” playing styles, and even tried to re-stage their forebears’ recording conditions, using only a few mics on musicians playing together in the same room. Brandishing the earnestness and style of seventies rhythm and blues, the album summons the flash and presentation of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “ September” music video, and the songs take an analog instrumental approach, layering in bass, strings, horns, and keys. As the lead single, “Leave the Door Open” already feels like a relic of two different epochs: seventies soul, with its fidelity and showmanship, and the winter months of the pandemic, with its emphasis on domestic comforts and its palpable longing for connection in close quarters.Īfter a lengthy, ten-month promotional cycle-the incessant tinkering that Mars is known for seems to have delayed the record’s release-their collaborative album, “An Evening with Silk Sonic,” has arrived, no worse for wear. Pandemic lockdowns allowed them to go all in on their extracurricular collaboration. The pair had met on tour, in 2017, and found a knack for making music out of their in-jokes. Paak’s tender vocals pleasantly accentuated by Mars’s fuller tone. The single was the first song the duo released under the name Silk Sonic, and it became clear that the two musicians-both devotees of classic soul who first distinguished themselves in other genres-were well-matched, with. “My house clean (House clean), my pool warm (Pool warm) / Just shaved, smooth like a newborn,” they sing, with Mars suggestively accenting. Paak released “Leave the Door Open,” a shimmering retro serenade that is as goofy as it is sincere. In March, Bruno Mars and the rapper Anderson.