Charles Bradley - 2018 - Black Velvet

 

Daptone Records – DAP-054  231.48MB FLAC

Black Velvet is a posthumous Charles Bradley album, but it does not behave like a memorial assembled from obvious career highlights. Released in 2018 by Dunham/Daptone, a little more than a year after Bradley’s death in September 2017, it collects unreleased songs, alternate versions, rare singles and covers recorded across the sessions for his three earlier studio albums. Producer and longtime collaborator Thomas “Tommy TNT” Brenneck assembled the record from material they had made together over roughly a decade. The result feels less like leftovers than one last room in the house. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

That distinction matters because Bradley’s recorded career was unusually concentrated. He became widely known late in life, and Daptone’s records captured a singer who already sounded as though several lifetimes had accumulated behind every phrase. Black Velvet reaches sideways through that short discography rather than summarizing it. “Can’t Fight the Feeling,” “I Feel a Change” and “Fly Little Girl” had not appeared on the previous albums. “Luv Jones” had existed as a rarer side. “Victim of Love” appears in an electric full-band version. The record also includes Bradley interpretations of Rodriguez, Nirvana and Neil Young. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

“Can’t Fight the Feeling” opens with exactly the kind of tension Bradley handled so well. The title could suggest surrender to romance, but his singing never makes surrender sound easy. His voice has friction built into it. Notes arrive scraped, pushed, squeezed and sometimes almost broken open. The Menahan Street Band gives him the kind of arrangement that lets those imperfections become the center rather than something to repair.

“Luv Jones,” featuring LaRose Jackson, is looser and funkier, with the duet format changing the emotional geometry. Bradley is no longer simply addressing an absent lover or narrating his own wounds. There is another voice in the room, another personality pushing back. The song feels social rather than solitary.

“I Feel a Change” is one of the album’s strongest pieces because the title fits Bradley almost too perfectly. Change in his music rarely sounds abstract. It sounds bodily. Something has happened, and the voice has to carry the evidence. The band keeps the arrangement spacious enough for every crack in his delivery to matter.

Then comes “Slip Away,” Bradley’s version of the Rodriguez song. He does not approach it as a museum cover. His whole method as an interpreter is to pull a song toward his own emotional temperature. Once Bradley is inside a composition, its original ownership starts becoming less important than what his voice can make it confess.

The title track, “Black Velvet,” is different from everything around it because Bradley does not sing on it at all. It is a Menahan Street Band instrumental that Bradley never got the chance to cut a vocal for. That absence is one of the most powerful facts on the album. The track was reportedly intended for him, but remained instrumental. On a record assembled after his death, the missing voice becomes audible in its own way. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

The title also reaches backward into Bradley’s pre-fame life. “Black Velvet” had been one of the stage names he used while performing as a James Brown impersonator. That history gives the phrase several meanings at once. It belongs to the earlier performer who spent years working outside major recognition, to the later Charles Bradley who finally recorded under his own name, and to this final album assembled after he was gone. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

“Stay Away” is the Nirvana cover, and on paper it might look like the novelty selection. In practice it makes complete sense. Bradley was never limited by genre because his real instrument was emotional pressure. A Nirvana song can be moved into deep soul if the singer finds the wound underneath the distortion. The transformation also exposes how much punk, grunge and soul can share when the production differences are stripped away: repetition, frustration, physical rhythm and a voice pushed close to its limits.

“Heart of Gold,” the Neil Young song, works from the opposite direction. Instead of aggression, Bradley finds weariness and searching. The song is already built around longing, so his voice does not need to break it apart as dramatically. He simply makes the longing heavier. Daptone specifically describes these covers of Nirvana, Neil Young and Rodriguez as part of the rarer material that gives Black Velvet its shape. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}

“(I Hope You Find) The Good Life” stretches beyond five minutes and lets the record breathe. It has a more psychedelic, expansive quality than some of Bradley’s tighter soul sides. The longer running time matters because so much of his work functions through compression. Here the band can circle the feeling instead of striking it immediately.

“Fly Little Girl” returns to something more compact and direct, while “Victim of Love (Electric Version)” closes the record by revisiting material associated with Bradley’s 2013 album in a different form. The full-band electric arrangement makes the song feel less polished and more physically exposed. Featuring the Sha La Das, it gives the final track additional vocal texture and makes the record end in motion rather than solemnity. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}

The sequence is only ten tracks long, but the sources are spread across Bradley’s recording life. That makes Black Velvet almost chronological without actually being sequenced as biography. Songs from different album sessions coexist because they share a relationship to Bradley that is more important than date.

The package photographed here reinforces that feeling. The front is unusually spare. CHARLES BRADLEY sits at the top in large white letters, BLACK VELVET underneath in darker outlined type, and Bradley himself appears almost entirely as a silhouette. His arms are extended against a pale gray-green sky with the low shapes of buildings along the bottom. There is very little visual information compared with the expressive force associated with his face and stage presence.

That silhouette becomes especially affecting knowing that the album was assembled after his death. The artwork does not present Bradley as a smiling portrait, a concert photograph or a nostalgic memorial image. He is there and not there at the same time. The body is recognizable, but detail has disappeared.

The Oakland Public Library copy belongs to the Main Library. A large MAIN LIBRARY sticker occupies the upper-right corner and partially covers the title area. At lower left, the classification label reads MAIN / CD / RB / BRADLEY with a circular RB marker covering its bottom. Once again, the municipal labels transform carefully designed commercial artwork into a working circulating object.

Inside, the left panel is dense with personnel information. The credits reveal how much Daptone’s sound depends on overlapping musicians rather than one fixed band lineup. Thomas Brenneck appears across guitar, bass and other instruments; Dave Guy on trumpet; Leon Michels on saxophone and organ; Nick Movshon on bass; Homer Steinweiss on drums; Victor Axelrod on piano; Fernando Velez on congas; and other players move through the tracks. Background singers include members of the Gospel Queens and the Sha La Das.

The small personal photograph beside those credits may be the most intimate image in the package. Bradley appears in a room among people wearing bright feathered costumes. Compared with the monumental silhouette outside, it feels almost private, an ordinary flash photograph from a life that existed beyond the carefully constructed public image.

The disc itself is beautiful in a very Daptone way. Deep green dominates the surface, crossed by thin white horizontal lines and a stack of concentric semicircles along the bottom. BLACK VELVET and CHARLES BRADLEY appear in white at the top, while DUNHAM stretches across the middle. The design looks partly like an old label and partly like technical instrumentation.

Then Oakland Public Library lands directly in the center.

The white hub sticker reads OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY / MAIN LIBRARY, and another library barcode sits near the top of the disc. The clean geometric design is interrupted by circulation hardware, but the interruption has become part of this particular copy.

The back cover is even more explicit about the record’s archival nature. The songs are divided into “SIDE ONE” and “SIDE TWO” even on the CD package, preserving the grammar of the vinyl edition. Each title includes small notes identifying its origin.

“Can’t Fight the Feeling” is identified as an unreleased track from the No Time for Dreaming sessions.

“Luv Jones” is noted as originally released as a 45 rpm single.

“I Feel a Change” comes from the Victim of Love sessions.

“Slip Away” had originally appeared as a Rodriguez tribute single.

“Black Velvet” is identified as an unreleased Menahan Street Band instrumental.

“Stay Away” and “Heart of Gold” were previously released as 45 rpm singles.

“(I Hope You Find) The Good Life” and the electric “Victim of Love” had appeared on limited-edition releases.

“Fly Little Girl” comes from the Changes sessions.

The back cover therefore doubles as a map showing where the pieces were recovered from. Black Velvet is not pretending all ten songs were made as one conventional album. It openly displays their scattered histories.

The Menahan Street Band is specifically highlighted on the back. That is appropriate because the instrumental relationship between Bradley and that circle of musicians is essential to his records. They do not merely accompany him. They build the physical floor underneath his voice.

The Main Library barcode occupies much of the upper-right corner of the back, partly obscuring the title and Dunham branding. The lower portion contains Bradley’s profile in black silhouette, echoing the front but turning the body inward. On the front his arms spread outward. On the back his head bows slightly forward.

That visual pairing almost creates its own sequence.

Open.

Closed.

Presence.

Absence.

The album was released November 9, 2018, after Bradley had died from cancer the previous year. Calling it his fourth and final studio album is technically accurate, but “final studio album” can imply that an artist knowingly entered a studio to make one last statement. That is not what happened here. Brenneck and the Daptone/Dunham family assembled recordings Bradley had already made, including things he expected might eventually be used and things that had remained on the edges of earlier projects. :contentReference[oaicite:6]{index=6}

That makes Black Velvet less like a goodbye letter and more like somebody opening drawers after a person is gone and realizing there is still beautiful work inside.

The title track makes that idea almost painfully concrete. The band made the music.

The vocal was supposed to come later.

Later never came.

So the empty space remains on the record.

And instead of trying to fill it with somebody else, they left it there.

That may be the most respectful decision on Black Velvet.

Charles Bradley is everywhere on this album, including the one track where he is missing.

— ChatGPT