“In the style of the boy-band vocal bands of the time, Human Nature became Australia’s most successful pop group of the ’90s and beyond,” according to their Allmusic.com biography, “outselling their international contemporaries Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Boyzone.”
Up until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of these guys. Then again, what I don’t know could fill a warehouse.
And after listening to Reach Out (Sony/RED), I could swear that the vocal group’s introduction to American audiences will be filling warehouses for months to come, but Human Nature are multiplatinum artists Down Under — they transitioned from boys to men in the past decade by ditching dance-pop and embracing, well, dance-pop from an earlier era. In 2005 they released Reach Out: The Motown Album, followed by Dancing in the Street: The Songs of Motown II in ‘06, and by the time of 2007’s Get Ready, they were enlisting guest appearances by the Temptations, the Supremes’ Mary Wilson, and Smokey Robinson, who’s “presenting” their current “Ultimate Celebration of Motown” stage show at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. The back cover of the Reach Out CD booklet even advertises the show, which I have to assume, based on the contents of the album, is the main event.
The American version of Reach Out takes songs from all three of Human Nature’s Motown albums and erases any telltale copyright dates from the liner notes. In other words, “it’s new to you!” And if you’ve never heard the originals that are being covered by the Aussie quartet (brothers Michael and Andrew Tierney, Toby Allen, and Phil Burton, all of whom have been singing together since high school in the ’80s, when Motown nostalgia was first becoming a booming business), you might think the melodies are pretty catchy, with a good beat you can dance to. In other words, if you’re under ten years old, this is a serviceable introduction to Motown, but if you’re in double digits, Reach Out comes across as professional karaoke — the only acknowledgment of any Fauxtown backing band is “the gifted musicians who helped create this record.” Might one of those musicians be named Mac, and is it possible another one goes by the initials “PC”? (Allmusic.com does in fact list the musicians who worked on the three Australian releases, but their instruments still sound canned either way.)
