Paul Janeway, frontman for the revivalist soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones, must have been blessed as a child. That might be a silly play on a band name, but how else do you explain this nerdy, bespectacled white boy from Birmingham somehow inheriting an Al Green-style croon and the panache of a natural soul singer? There's just something uncanny about how well Janeway and his all-white group of sidemen so fully embody the spirit of the Muscle Shoals musicians they kind of grew up around on their 2014 debut Half the City , extending into the exacting funk of James Brown and the tight spirals and danceable psychedelic stirrings of post-1970 Motown on last year's Sea of Noise .
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