The Neville Brothers – Yellow Moon
purchase this album (Amazon)

Morning, Popdose faithful! Who’s in the mood for a new series? You? Good!

Starting today, we’d like you to meet the Popdose Flashback series, in which we’ll focus on a different 20-year-old album every week — meaning that from now through the end of the year, your devoted Popdose staff will be reliving at least 51 of the most noteworthy releases of 1989. First up: the Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon.

The Nevilles have been making albums since the mid ’70s, but by the late ’80s, it looked like they were destined for commercial oblivion; even 1987’s Uptown — which featured guest appearances from Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia, Keith Richards, Ronnie Montrose, and Branford Marsalis — failed to light a spark on the charts. They were always a critically respected band, and their live performances were a consistent draw, but like a lot of acts, they’d had problems replicating that magic in the studio. There were obviously a number of reasons for this, but in my opinion, the biggest flaws in most Neville Brothers records — both before and after Yellow Moon — are a lack of consistently compelling material and an unwillingness to either lock Aaron out of the sessions or relegate him to tambourine duty. Aaron Neville is a talented singer with a very distinctive voice, but the weakest tracks or any given Neville Brothers album often feature his melisma-riddled vocals; I know mothers-in-law go nuts for his sensitive crooning, but when it’s sandwiched between steaming slices of Big Easy funk, it tends to drag things down a bit.

Yellow Moon doesn’t solve either problem — in terms of song-to-song quality, it’s probably one of the weakest albums we’ll cover in the series this year, and it includes a number of typically over-the-top performances from Aaron — but thanks to the involvement of a certain Mr. Daniel Lanois, it’s probably the Nevilles’ best-produced release, and it’s certainly their most successful, so it merits inclusion here. (more…)