- Someone needs to get on the task of making the ultimate DJ mix of recent house tracks that reuse classic Motown vocals. Mark E's "You (Full Vocal Mix)" and Argenis Brito's "Heartbreaker," slicing and dicing Diana Ross and Edwin Starr, respectively, are two commanding recent examples, and so is "My Love," off Crazy P Presents MTS Vol. 1. This time the recipient of the touch-up is Smokey Robinson, and they could hardly have chosen better: "Open your heart and let my love come in," he beseeches, a moment swiped from "More Love," a song written for Smokey's wife, Claudette, following a miscarriage.
"My Love"'s brilliance lies in locating a line that really works repeated in isolation—you couldn't have picked a better one from that song. It's from early in the Miracles recording, the first verse—the chorus following it is where Smokey really dives in vocally, starts delivering his soul. From there on out, it becomes Robinson's most singularly impassioned performance. If Crazy P had gone with the second verse's emotional peak, "This is no fiction, this is no act/This is real, it's fact"—Robinson's voice slightly breaking on the last two words—it might have been unbearable. Instead he goes for something more flowery, but it's also frothier, and when you build that on itself it piles up into something luxurious.
"Makes Me Wanna" is the B-side. A clipped guitar and headlong boom-clop rhythm charge straight ahead, picking up occasional echoed-falsetto cries, computer-chipper repeats of "Don't stop," congas in space, and a couple brothers shooting the breeze. There is always room in the world for one more record that takes "Throw" as a starting point and dub drift as a site for play.
Tracklist A My Love
B Make Me Wanna