Jump and Shout

Barrence Whitfield does not sing so much as evacuate — the sound that comes out of him on "Jump and Shout" has the force of something that needed an exit, a scream converted into music only at the last possible moment before it became pure noise. The production behind him is lean and hard, anchored by a guitar riff that feels borrowed from the earliest days of rock and roll before anyone had decided what rock and roll was supposed to sound like, and a rhythm section playing with a loose-limbed, swinging urgency that owes as much to Little Richard's band as to anything that came after. The horns, when they enter, hit with a joyful brutality — they don't smooth things out, they amplify the already overwhelming sense that something is about to come apart. What's remarkable about Whitfield is that his vocal extremity doesn't feel like technique or affectation; it sounds like the physical response to the music rather than something imposed upon it, as if the groove demanded that level of release and his body simply complied. The song's message is its method — this is a command performance of ecstatic abandon, an argument that sometimes the most articulate response to a great beat is to stop articulating entirely. Boston's 1980s R&B underground never produced anything more physically direct. You play this when a room needs to understand that it has been standing still for too long.