Album Review: DIG! by Mamas Gun
The British soul five-piece records straight to tape and writes love songs about feeding fires and staying married.
Translator’s Note: Originally written in Japanese; translated into English for publication.
The analogue-soul revival has been running for the better part of twenty years, long enough that most of its founding institutions (Daptone, Truth & Soul, Big Crown, Colemine) have settled into recognisable house styles you can identify within four bars of a snare crack. Bands that absorbed the same influences without picking up a label aesthetic along the way are rare, and ones with six albums to their name are rarer. Mamas Gun, the British five-piece who took their name from Erykah Badu’s 2000 record and have been at this since Andy Platts placed a Myspace ad for musicians in 2007, have had the working room and the catalogue to do exactly that. DIG! was tracked straight to 16-track analogue tape by engineer Neil Innes at All Things Analogue Studios in Leeds, all of it cut by the same five musicians in one room, no overdubs as a default position. The title track features Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron’s longtime keyboard partner and one of the architects of what eventually got called neo-soul, sharing lead vocal with Platts over a jazz-funk arrangement that puts him inside the band rather than in front of it. His flute staggers through the verses and his keys trade phrases with Platts where the vocals stack.
Platts had been in New York in 2006 chasing his first publishing deal when Jackson first walked into a session with him. He was being passed around the city’s writers’ rooms (among them Rod Temperton and John Oates) and Jackson came in to one of those sessions and they started a song they never finished. They stayed in touch in the loose way American musicians and British musicians stay in touch across an ocean, neither one in a position to fly over for a weekend. Nearly twenty years later, Platts sent Jackson a demo of the song that would become “DIG!” and Jackson said yes. By that point Platts had built a working life on both sides of the Atlantic, slow-climbing through Mamas Gun LPs like Golden Days (2018) and Cure the Jones (2023) while co-fronting Young Gun Silver Fox, his west-coast soul duo with Shawn Lee that has charted number-one singles in Japan and South Korea while remaining mostly invisible at home. Two decades of loose correspondence cashed in on a single demo.
The songs themselves, then, are mostly about how grown people stay together. “Food for the Flames,” the first single, the one BBC 6 Music and Jazz FM picked up, says it plain. A spark and tinder won’t get you anywhere, and faith and tenderness won’t either. You have to feed the fire every day and dig deeper every day, and the hardest work is the work that actually gives back. “Living on Mercy” describes the moment of realizing he’s been the one being carried, held up night and day by a partner whose patience is a finite resource, and announces he’s done with that arrangement and ready to be the rock she leans on instead. “Hardest Yards,” co-produced with Connor Reeves (who shaped the band’s two best-known songs, “This Is the Day” and “You Make My Life a Better Place”), is about the temporary leavings inside a relationship that’s still intact, where every goodbye breaks something and every step away feels like a thousand miles. “Had Me at Goodbye” inverts the same arc, with a couple sleeping back to back instead of face to face, ready to let go; it took feeling her slip through his fingers for him to hold on tight. And Platts is now old enough to sing all of it straight.
The gospel grammar on DIG! doesn’t come with gospel obligations. “The Proof,” one of the last tracks Platts finished for the LP and the most overtly Stevie Wonder-shaped number on it, builds an entire love song out of theological argument. Church on Sundays as a kid, never a choice, never a sign, but he does believe in miracles, and if there’s gotta be a heaven he sees it in the eyes of the woman he’s singing to. He takes Sunday-morning testimony language and sings it as a devotional: the only church that matters is rejoicing in your name. “Wings” runs a similar substitution in a quieter register, with Platts marvelling that his partner’s faith is strong enough to fly him into heaven for sins anyone else would have walked away from. “Joy” rounds the same corner late in the running, asking whether joy itself might be the only thing that matters before Platts’ young daughter takes the final lines, smaller and less polished than her father, and not pretending otherwise.
What you hear when you put any of this on is five musicians who have logged the road miles to make tape recording look easy. The kick drum has the slight thump of a real room responding to it instead of the surgical perfection of a sample. Bleed between the Hammond and the guitar amps shows up in the corners of the stereo field. All room, no booth. Platts phrases behind the beat the way Curtis Mayfield used to, his singing falling where the rhythm section also sits, half a hair late on every downbeat. The Spinners turn up in the harmony stack behind “Had Me at Goodbye.” Marvin Gaye is audible in the chord movement under “Living on Mercy,” and the Gamble and Huff sound the band cites as a touchstone shows up in the way the songs let a hook sit for half a bar before the next downbeat arrives. Five players who’ve been at it together long enough to treat the old records as working tools, not museum exhibits.
Six albums in, the band is following its own directive. Scratch past the surface, burn the deadwood, get past the phony friends and the dust and the decay until you find whatever salvation is buried below. Platts has the K-pop publishing money and the Young Gun Silver Fox sales to fund whatever Mamas Gun wants to do, and what Mamas Gun wants to do is sit in a Leeds tape room with Brian Jackson on the keys and write about feeding fires every day, which is not bad for a sixth go-around. Put the title track on and try to hear where Platts ends and Jackson begins.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “DIG!,” “Hardest Yards,” “Phantom Love”