Producer John Morales celebrates the life and work of R&B / soul legend Teena Marie with a double album full of brand new remixes, lovingly crafted from the original studio tapes, entitled Love Songs & Funky Beats...

I'm struggling to fathom who this album is targetted at. Teena Marie's sound is so niche that we're already dealing with a very small market of potential buyers. Add to that the fact a lot of her fans may now feel that what they once loved is very dated and a little cheesy... and you have so few potential buyers that it seems a lot of time and effort to go to.

I'm not intimately familiar with Marie's songs to the point I knew that these were remixes, but I played some original tracks at the same time as these remixes and the differences (of the tracks I heard) were not obvious unless you know the originals inside out.

The music is dated and certainly sounds of its time... but unlike a lot of BBE Music's releases of long forgotten and/or overlooked artists it's not something I found you can discover for the first time and come away wishing you'd discovered when the songs were originally released.

A very niche, rather dated collection of songs that Morales has reworked subtly to enhance the original for a modern audience.

6

Nick Smithson