Midnight Flyer

A second outing from 1960s icons Steve Cropper of the MG's and Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals, following 2008’s fine, Stax-grooving Nudge It Up a Notch, Midnight Flyer builds on the same retro-soul template. Again the playing is impeccable, with Cropper delivering the precise, tonally perfect guitar leads he’s done his whole impressive career, while Cavaliere still has an expressively soulful voice and a wonderfully natural and joyous sense of phrasing, and track after track here starts like it’s going to burn the house down. Most of these tracks were written by either Cropper or Cavaliere, or both (there are a couple of covers, most notably one of Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain”), and while everything sounds great, the songs sometimes shade into the generic, and the house escapes with mostly just smoke damage. The most memorable and grooving track is the last one, “Do It Like This,” which is really an MG's-like instrumental with occasional vocal interjections, but both of these artists can still deliver the goods, and the assembled band has a wonderful, deep south Stax groove capability.