A second outing from 1960s icons
Steve Cropper of the
MG's and
Felix Cavaliere of
the Rascals, following 2008’s fine, Stax-grooving
Nudge It Up a Notch,
Midnight Flyer builds on the same retro-soul template. Again the playing is impeccable, with
Cropper delivering the precise, tonally perfect guitar leads he’s done his whole impressive career, while
Cavaliere still has an expressively soulful voice and a wonderfully natural and joyous sense of phrasing, and track after track here starts like it’s going to burn the house down. Most of these tracks were written by either
Cropper or
Cavaliere, or both (there are a couple of covers, most notably one of
Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain”), and while everything sounds great, the songs sometimes shade into the generic, and the house escapes with mostly just smoke damage. The most memorable and grooving track is the last one, “Do It Like This,” which is really an
MG's-like instrumental with occasional vocal interjections, but both of these artists can still deliver the goods, and the assembled band has a wonderful, deep south Stax groove capability. ~ Steve Leggett