from the LP Born Again, Cotillion Records, 1971Even though many of us associate the advent of talk-boxes with Peter Frampton’s use of one on his inconceivably famous …Comes Alive set, their invention actually came several decades earlier, and they’d been used extensively across several genres of music before he made the things de rigueur; in fact, as this funky track skillfully demonstrates for us, Frampton wasn’t even the first to use a talk box in tandem with a wah-wah pedal. This slick-ass number from Young-Holt Unlimited deftly showcases both of the gadgets’ abilities and their appeal, adding a layer of jelly-kneed sleaze to the proceedings which couldn’t be generated by anything else, not even if they’d added dirty lyrics in their place. These cats were primarily an instrumental crew, something which certainly limited their appeal to wider audiences, but the confidant interplay makes up for any loss of storyline, in my opinion anyways.
