Smokey Robinson - Gasms

 

First album of new material since 2009!

Smoky Robinson muses about love and lust on Gasms

Gasms is the 2023 studio album by legendary soul music vocalist Smokey Robinson and is the first album of all-new material from Robinson, since 2009.

The first thing to know about Gasms is that it's a proper album — not a live album, a Christmas album, a standards album, or a celebration of the soul legend's songbook thronged with younger guests, but an actual record of new material, writes Pitchfork. He doesn't make these often anymore. His last real album came out in 2009, the one before that a decade prior. Robinson is 83. Even assuming his enviable run of good health continues, at this rate there's no guarantee there will be another.

The pace of Robinson's new material has slowed considerably since the '80s, but the quality has rarely dipped. Hearing Robinson's eternal muses of love and lust animate him as thoroughly in his eighties as they did nearly a half century ago is one of the pleasures of Gasms, which at its best plays like the ultimate refinement of Robinson's late-career output.

"Compared to 2009's Time Flies When You're Having Fun, which itself was a perfectly respectable victory lap, the songwriting on Gasms is better calibrated, the emotions more pronounced, and the production more sumptuous yet less intrusive, devoid of any tells about what year — or even decade — it might have been recorded. Like Robinson's best work, it exists in a state of suspended timelessness." — Pitchfork

Robinson admits Gasms is his most blatantly sexy collection, and that jumps out with the title track, in which he tells his lover "You give me gasms" — eyegasms and eargasm. Another song, "I Fit in There," has the lyrics, "If you've got an inner vacancy/Baby then make it a place for me."

"I consider all the songs to be food for thought. You can take them wherever you want to take them," Robinson says. "Whatever your thought pattern is for any of those titles that's really what I want them to be. I want them to be food for thought."

Robinson, whose catalog of hits includes "My Girl," "The Tracks of My Tears" and "I Second That Emotion," says he doesn't write hoping for chart success.

"There's no formula. There's no process, man. It's just you write what you feel. You have given it your best," he says. "You do it until you feel as though you've given it your best shot."

 

Side A

Gasms

How You Make Me Feel

I Wanna Know Your Body

I Keep Callin' You

Roll Around

Side B

Beside You

If We Don't Have Each Other

You Fill Me Up

I Fit In There

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