Released: June 1974
Look, you weren’t really a superstar Black musician in the 1970s until you were asked to score a movie. Just ask Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown.
Well, since Barry White got to score Together Brothers that means that he was now such a star.
Coming along for the ride of course were Love Unlimited and the Love Unlimited Orchestra as this is the only album officially billed to all three acts.
Like a lot of blaxploitation soundtracks, this has some ups and (lots of) downs imposed by the need to include mood pieces that are fine in the movie, but don’t hold up on vinyl.
For example, “So Nice to Hear” seems perfectly at home as background music to actors walking someplace in the film cuz your mind is more focused on the screen than the music itself. But isolated on its own? “So Nice to Hear” turns into muzak.
Another issue is that a lot of these tracks run between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, so they really are more akin to snippets of sound than songs. That makes it hard for the album to achieve a true flow.
Fortunately there is “real” music here like “Somebody’s Gonna Off the Man”, which has somewhat hokey lyrics, but can’t argue with that beat. White was determined to bring some funk on this one, especially since this was his opportunity to not be a love man, but instead talk about the streets.
The Love Unlimited Orchestra kills it on “Theme From Together Brothers” with some great funky Latin vibes. The chicka chicka guitar and whistle-like strings would be sampled by the Quad City DJs to create the mid-90s hit “C’Mon N’ Ride It (The Train)”.
Love Unlimited gets their vocal feature on “People Of Tomorrow Are the Children of Today”. It’s a perfectly average, if overly sappy, song.
“Stick Up” is a brief, but satisfying little funk-rock romp from the Orchestra.
The worst thing here, though, is a truncated version of “Honey Please, Can’t Ya See” which was from White’s solo album Stone Gon’. It’s the worst not because it’s bad, but because it’s lazy.
ALBUM GRADE: D
With a grand total of 21 tracks, of which only half get over two minutes in runtime, you can tell this is a potpourri effort. For every song worth checking out, there’s three or four that can be skipped.
I won’t bother rating every track, cuz there’s 21 of them, but here’s the decent/good stuff.
Song Scores
Somebody's Gonna off the Man: 6.5
Theme From Together Brothers: 8
Stick Up: 7