Linda Jones - Your Precious Love (1972)

You know that feeling, when you sing so hard you think you're gonna puke?  No?  Well, Linda Jones knows a thing or two about that feeling.  This record is a showcase of one of the most impressive and criminally overlooked vocalists in soul history.  Released posthumously in 1972 after her tragic death at 27 due to complications with diabetes, Your Precious Love is a dynamite album.

The music behind the voice ain't nothin' to sniff at either.  Syrupy sweet backing vocals drip soul over organs, strings, and a sharp lead guitar.  But oh, those vocals.  The songs aren't so much sung as they are attacked.  Destroyed, vandalized, and ripped to shreds.  It's incredible, and a testament to Linda Jones that songs recorded forty years ago can still have such a raw, visceral, and immediate quality.

Highlights include the title track, Not on the Outside, and Behold.  Disclaimer.  Singing along my cause you to cough up a lung.

Buddy Miles - Buddy Miles Live! (1971)

By the time he was 12 years old, Buddy Miles had already been labeled a child prodigy.  At 12, he would play drums with his Dad's band the Bebop's, and as a teenager would spend time in Ruby and the Romantics, The Delfonics, and the Ink-Spots.

So began his storied musical career that would see him play with everyone from Mike Butterfield in seminal blues-rock outfit Electric Flag, to a stint with his friend Jimi Hendrix in the short-lived side project Band of Gypsies. After releasing a live album with a young Carlos Santana, he would even find success later in his career as the frontman to the now infamous ad campaign, California Raisins.  

This set finds Buddy in Seattle, post-Hendrix, with a group called simply the Buddy Miles band.  Over the course of the set, Miles handles drums and vocals, and shows just how experienced he was at performing all different styles of American music.  From rock, to pop, blues, funk, and soul this record touches them all.  Highlights include "Them Changes", "We Got to Live Together", and the epic, aching, soulful cover of Neil Young's "Down By The River"