Mojo - The Music Magazine

...SEE NUMBER 4

The Temptations
Sky’s The Limit
(Gordy, 1971)

The final appearance of Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams. Also the band’s greatest album.

Legend has it that when the first experimental batch of MDMA powder turned up on the streets of Detroit in the cold early months of 1971, one of the first curious recipients was Temptations producer Norman Whitfield. Ever keen to push the sonic boundaries of his most treasured outfit he introduced the vocal group to the expansive sensual high of the love-generation psychedelic and set in motion the new sound of Sky’s The Limit, a lush, epic journey up to the apex of celestial soul. Like all legends, it’s probably rubbish, but listening again to this euphoric heat-haze of an album, it kinda makes sense. The Tempts take the epic acid funk workouts of 1970’s Psychedelic Shack and stretch out the centres and soften the edges, pulling you down into a lush paradise of swirling strings and vocal harmonies. Of course, like all drug highs, once you go beyond the pretty surfaces there are darker forces at work. Behind the heavenly love and dreams of elopement we find It Was Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) while Smiling Faces Sometimes pretend to be your friend. Next came the expansive, biographical, slow ghetto groove of Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone but before that the group lost their sweet heartbreak vocal sound when Eddie Kendricks went solo, and on August 17, 1973 the deeply troubled Paul Williams was found in a deserted parking lot near Hitsville USA, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The band would continue to make great records but in so many ways, the ecstasy had disappeared.

Andrew Male/em>

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