Love Is Overtaking Me

We Say...

Review by Tim Lawrence

The producer of outré compositional music, disco and new wave as well as uniquely ethereal voice-cello dub and hip-hop-inflected pop, Arthur Russell moved within and between the aesthetically progressive music scenes of downtown New York with unsurpassed mobility and open-mindedness. Largely unrecognized during his liminal lifetime, the composer and multi-instrumentalist died of complications arising from AIDS in 1992 a forlorn and largely isolated figure. Yet since the beginning of 2004, when Audika Records and Soul Jazz released two posthumous albums more or less simultaneously, interest in Russell's life and music has surged like never before. Audika's fifth offering, Love Is Overtaking Me reveals yet another Russell; not the border-crossing experimentalist who floated across downtown New York with effortless ease, but the Iowan-born singer-songwriter who hoped to touch listeners with songs of simplicity and beauty.

Presenting 21 home recordings and studio demos that were laid down solo or with a series of mutating line-ups including Bright and Early, the Sailboats, Turbo Sporty and, perhaps most influentially, the Flying Hearts, the album veers from melodic country ("Close My Eyes") to voice-cello odes ("Eli") to uplifting pop ("I Forget and I Can't Tell") and melancholy ballads ("Love Is Overtaking Me"). Delicate yet direct, these and other tracks are the ideal showcase for a singer-songwriter who once managed to convince legendary A&R executive John Hammond he could be the next Dylan or Springsteen. Drawn from an archive of some 800 reel-to-reel tapes, the songs on Love Is Overtaking Me have an unfinished quality. Far from reducing their appeal, though, that half-done effect only draws the listener deeper into the beautiful mystery that was Arthur Russell.