Various Artists, Stax Sings Motown (Stax)

Stax Sings Motown’s preview CD arrived without artist credits, making it easier, in the end, to concentrate on specific voices and attitudes, as opposed to what I already thought of any given names. “Stop in the Name of Love” starts in confrontation, and while we don’t hear the man’s side of the story, he’s quickly in the soup. Lacking the assurance of that ineffable Miss Ross, this chick gets thick. She doesn’t boil over, but she marks her male with rough anger in pleading steam. Click along and you’ll find another sermon, someone else laying more out on the line before “Someday We’ll Be Together,” a second Supremes melody rubbed slightly rough, coat askew with grit in the hair, mud on shoes. It’s another storefront gospel arrangement which would, in the real world, attract and include those a touch less proper than the Divine Miss R.  A fresh-from-the-pasture Stax cowboy sings a lonesome lament to a boom-chicka (not boom-chicka-boom) beat without overcoming his background singers’ single, simple lament “Oh how I wish that it would rain.” (And I won’t keep you in suspense like they did me:  that’s Margie Joseph, Frederick Knight, and O.B. McClinton, respectively.)