Ike and Tina Turner
River deep mountain high

THE REVIEW

It's just a moment, at the beginning Tina almost seems to be elsewhere...

Elsewhere... and as if submerged by the monstrous puffing of a tribal and sweet sound... even the du du stickiness of the choruses does not leave the usual familiar soul feeling...

It doesn't feel like home, in short... or maybe there's no one at home, it's up to you...

And everything is bewildered and out of tune... or out of sync... Even if it's bewildered, out of tune, or out of sync by just a fraction...

Or maybe it's simply that you wouldn't expect a piece by Ike and Tina to be like this...

But it's just a moment, we were saying, just a moment... Then comes the scream, very black and like sandpaper...

Then maybe there's no paper, maybe there's only the glass...

And the wall of that monster called hyper production, a wall that here reaches immense heights, well, that wall suddenly finds something to chew on...

And a sort of pitched battle begins, where if the voice overdoes it, the thump thump becomes increasingly massive and the strings fly incredibly expansive...

Actually no, they don’t fly at all... or rather they would fly, airy and sugary as they are, if they were alone... But they are not alone... they are amidst the chaos of another million instruments...

Amidst the chaos or the whirlpool or God knows what...

Because here Mr. Phil Spector is truly Wagnerian and the infinite grace of his symphonies for kids is completely abandoned to make way for a brilliant and astonishing almost psychedelic cacophony.

The feeling is one of excitement and disorientation together...

But I haven't said everything, because halfway through the track, to regain the dissipated energy, there is a truce with handclaps, then a train starts whose run you'd want never to end. And, in the end, the chorus again, the chaos again...

You reach the end disconcerted, like after having a total experience...

A madman devoted to art brut defined his way of painting as absolute painting language, well if I had to define “River deep...” it would be something similar...

Absolute sound language? Kick-ass sound language?

It's up to you...

Here the man with the gun and the hyper-energetic black girl have truly gone beyond... even regarding budget, probably... just twenty thousand dollars went to good Ike to keep him away from the studios...

One man with a gun was enough...

Oh believe me you'll never find a Phil Spector track like this, nor an Ike and Tina one... And you'll never find a decent version of this song other than the studio one...

“River deep, mountain high” is simply a miracle...