Shawn Lee f/ Darondo: "Stay Away From Me"

Lately I’ve been on one of those cliché late-sixties/early-seventies kicks where one sits on the computer YouTubing the most obscure psychedelic rock, soul, and Krautrock in the hope that one or two of those misty, disappeared legends are actually worth listening to, and for the off-chance that you might hit on something good that hasn’t yet been regurgiblogged and then just as quickly forgotten again. It’s the kind of thing memorialized in Wilco’s “The Late Greats”: fetishizing lost things and first times to the point of ridiculousness, like remembering the devastation of one’s virginity as the discovery of sex for the very first time for the human race; everything you do is Meaningful and covered in an old-movie haze.

Darondo already popped his rediscovery cherry a couple years ago when “Didn’t I” started making the rounds as one of those in-a-million finds, an instant classic falsetto/guitar/soul slow-burner that brought out everybody’s “proto-Cody Chesnutt” comparisons and got added to a respectable number of indie make-out mixes. Then John Mayer started big-upping him, the singles comp was decent, and he didn’t do anything new, so whatever, what’s the next thing.

Well, now he’s back, and while it’s not quite like the first time, the instant authority that soul survivors like Sharon Jones get amidst the sea of talented but unavoidably Young, Rich and White revivalists like Amy Winehouse and Jamie Lidell is out in full force here, pungent and thick. Soul In The Hole has still got a little bit of the not-quite-right feeling that the creepily retro-obsessed Dap-Kings give Sharon Jones; it’s multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee’s recreation of old school soul with a parade of guest vocalists over the top. But instead of trying to get as close as possible to an unattainable ideal, “Stay Away From Me” keeps the drums big and sample-simple and lets Darondo’s aged but still potent inflections stay up front to really sell the thing. The trajectory of the song is a bit anticlimactic after the initial thrill of the vocals, combined with an accompaniment that’s unafraid to use anachronism while remaining true to the broad feeling of a genre and time period fleeting, if not already gone, but in the end, just the fact that “Stay Away From Me” manages to champion Darondo in top form and tossing off memorable catcalls along with a sympathetic, effective producer is important enough. Most crate-digging finds end up as tokens to be passed around while we fantasize about the first time we found them in Nuggets series; it’s lucky that one can show signs of keeping up a healthy listener relationship.