“I am so desperate/just to be closer to you,” she sings. Wilson - who wrote most of the album’s songs, sometimes with the producer Rick Robinson - saves the language of desire for the end of the record, in a slow ballad, “More of You.” Typically, it builds its meaning as its lines repeat and repeat. Most of “Worship Soul” uses the language of assurance, but Ms. Wilson, vocal perfectionist, sounds more improvisational.) And later, even funkier, even slower, is “He Shows Out.” “Don’t you worry,” she sings, the choir echoing each line “be still and know/the God we serve, he’s in control/every time he shows up, he shows out.” The track is a microcosm of the record, which works at maintaining a natural link between gospel and various kinds of R&B - ’70s, ’90s, current - with a band that wants to use its feeling for Sly and the Family Stone, for Parliament-Funkadelic, for D’Angelo, for J Dilla.Īt first the album feels almost formal, dutifully hitting its marks of comfort and modernity, nearly stalling out in an overlong cover of James Taylor’s “Shower the People” then it grows intense and joyful at the middle, in a medium-slow funk version of James Cleveland’s “Jesus Will.” It’s more than nine minutes long, and the musicians use it like a workshop, piling in riffs, borrowed and inspired Phil Lassiter’s cool, minimal brass arrangements and Calvin Rodgers’s late-arriving snare-drum hits loosen it up. Up to that point in the song there’s been a fair amount of caution and tepidity in the music - clichéd chord changes, percussion chimes and so on - but they cease to matter. The ballad “Speechless” ran to nearly five minutes when it came out as a single last year, and here it’s more than six minutes long it doesn’t truly get good until almost halfway through, when the horn arrangements start varying, the choir splits into harmonizing parts, and Ms. You need restraint to understand abandon. “It’s done,” she sings in one of the tracks, meaning her “healing,” her “victory.” “What I shall be, I already am,” she sings. God does his work perfectly, and as long as you believe, then hold on, wait, trust, pray, keep still.
Like an insurer she brings you confidence and urges you not to worry. Her long tones are even even when her voice deepens and roughens slightly, her phrases remain tight and effective. On her first album, “Worship Soul,” her voice is bright, clear, amiable, professional. The excellent gospel singer Anita Wilson can sometimes sound as if she’s going to put down the microphone and tell you about company policy. But the group can’t wholly escape itself, opening with the title track, a king-size song about modesty and rebaptism, and closing with “A Little Home.” That song is vintage Rascal Flatts, a storytelling verse about someone feeling alienated, saved by the intervention of a loved one, and a soaring voice to drive home the point.
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