John Murph on PPP (Platinum Pied Pipers)

from The Root

Motown 2.0
by John Murph

Detroit supergroup PPP’s new album, ‘Abundance,’ celebrates the Motown sound with a snazzy hipster edge.

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R&B albums rarely combine the multiple musical legacies of one given city and catch the zeitgeist of its time as masterfully as PPP’s sophomore disc, Abundance (Ubiquity). As the title suggests, producer Waajeed and multi-instrumentalist Saadiq—the group’s two brainiacs—pack so much historical reference, so much modern perspective, so much deft musicality, so much lyrical ingenuity, and so much vivacity that Abundance is full of artistic riches.

Hailing from Detroit, it comes as no surprise that PPP (formerly Platinum Pied Pipers) bolsters much of Abundance with the epochal sounds of Motown, which celebrates its golden anniversary this year. But Motown, particularly its ’60s halcyon years, has informed a motherlode of recent albums, notably Amy Winehouse’s 2006’s breakout disc, Back to Black (Island), Solange Knowles’ nifty Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams (Music World/Geffen, 2008) and Raphael Saadiq’s fawning The Way I See It. Referencing Motown now seems purely trendy if not passé.

Although syncopated handclaps, snazzy snare-drum intros and soulful doo-wop harmonies rouse songs like “Go Go Go,” “Countless Excuses” and “Rocket Science,” Abundance channels more of Norman Whitfield’s urgent soul psychadelica that he wrote for the Undisputed Truth and Edwin Starr rather than Holland-Dozier-Holland’s sweet innocence that other current Motown-inspired discs bite.

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