Roland Gift - Crushed

Roland Gift has never been a prolific artist. Even in his heyday in the 1980s as the front man with the Fine Young Cannibals, there was a gap of three years between their two albums, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’ (1985) and the number one record, ‘The Raw and the Cooked’(1988). In the time since then, Gift’s output has been slender, three songs in 1996 when the Fine Young Cannibals briefly reformed for a Greatest Hits album, ‘The Finest’, and a self-titled debut solo album in 2002. Now Gift is back with just a single song, ‘Crushed’, which, unfortunately immediately cutting off a large proportion of his mature fan base, is frustratingly being released as a download only single. As always with Gift, however, while there may be not much in the way of quantity, there is a lot of quality. Roland Gift has always divided his work between that with a soul sound (‘Good Thing’, ‘Blue’, ‘Suspicious Minds’) and that with a techno pop sound (‘She Drives Me Crazy’, ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)’), and ‘Crushed’ falls firmly into the the latter category. Beginning as a gently breezing piano ballad, it soars steadily upwards into a thunderous soul classic with pulsating harmonies and a chorus of female backing vocals. When a love-jaded Gift sings on it, “I was crushed when I heard about you/I was crushed broken and blue/running around with someone new”, he has all the power and poignancy of Sam Cooke or a young Al Green. ‘Crushed’ is an exquisite, all-too-rare offering from a singer who the music world doesn’t hear enough from.