Love Train: The Sound Of Philadelphia

Forget the spate of "Philly soul" reissues and compilations that have hit the market in the past few years, especially if you didn't buy any of them, because this four-disc beauty is, for the time being at least, the final word on the sound created and largely maintained by the Gamble-Huff production team. The box's real beauty, however, is how it digs deeper and further than earlier comps, giving for the first time a full picture of how the Philadelphia International juggernaut came to rule the Seventies airwaves.

The increasingly lost art of the box set is a precise one. Add on too many hits, and you flirt with irrelevancy; too many rarities, and you risk losing the thread of the story. And stories are the main function of box sets, which almost always move in a straight line: for example, Love Train: The Sound Of Philadelphia is, on the surface, the story of Philadelphia International Records, the label that gave us the smooth, romantic Philly Soul of the O'Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, The Three Degrees and more. But the confluence of megalabels brought on by globalization cleared the way for this set to dive back into the pre-PIR history of the legendary producers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff; the result is a story about the birth of a sound, not just a company.

All the big label hits you know are here, and the compilers are judicious in allowing which ones run on album-length (yes on the O'Jays' "For The Love Of Money" and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' heartbreaking spoken-word ballad "I Miss You," but not so much William DeVaughn's "Be Thankful For What You Got"). You can hear the Gamble-Huff sound take form before the label, on the Intruders' "Cowboys To Girls" and Jerry Butler's "Only The Strong Survive," reach perhaps its greatest flowering in the Spinners productions done for Atlantic, inspire disco, and last well into the dawn of the hip-hop era. But there's also a nod to the burgeoning "rare groove" crowd with productions for cult artists like Bunny Sigler, People's Choice and a late-period Dee Dee Sharp doing her best career work, and several cuts by "one-hit" wonders like Billy Paul and People's Choice that never quite solidified their place in the pop market. And finally, the inclusion of over 15,000 words by various experts and bystanders on the duo's sound makes this set a must-have for even the casual Philly Soul fan.