Ben Harper’s love for the humble lap-steel comes to a bold (and incalculably beautiful) peak with this 15-track instrumental trawl down trails of smoky soul, melancholic Americana and slick, summery folk. It’s downright incredible how much artistic ground the Californian bluesman is able to cover unaccompanied on Winter – the whole LP is just his prized Monteleone lap-steel, inhumanly articulate fretting hands and unfettered love for music as a spoon with which to stir emotion.
Few would deny John Coltrane's genius or his substantial influence on an entire generation of jazz musicians. That said, however, his is not necessarily the name that comes immediately to mind when you're thinking about a soundtrack for romance – Coltrane's trademark "sheets of sound" approach to modal improvisation and his sometimes harsh tone may get listeners in the mood for many things, but love might not be one of them. However, this collection of ballad recordings originally issued on various albums between 1957 and 1958 makes a good case for Trane as a bedroom minstrel.
Arguably the Temptations' best album since Truly For You dropped in 1984, For Lovers Only is not the Temptations' first album of standards. This set of classics is different than Temptations in a Mellow Mood, where they acquiesced to the material, giving relatively straight readings, and never deviated far from the songs' popular arrangements. The only things the standards on For Lovers Only have in common with the originals are the titles and the lyrics, the arrangements are completely different, and the tempos are changed. The Temptations' sing with this much enthusiasm in years.