Marta Ren & The Groovelets - Stop Look Listen
Like a true, authentic blast from the past, Marta Ren’s debut album ‘Stop. Look. Listen’ with her backing band The Groovelets comes with such passion and vigour that her fellow soul sisters of the 60’s would stop and take notice.
It’s been a slow process for Marta, who first started singing in the 90’s for The Bombazines, and the fact it’s taken so long for her to get a larger recognition outside of of her native Portugal feels all the more baffling when hear just how beautiful her vocal range can be.
The album itself feels as though it plays out like a live performance, with huge bursts of energy offset by more melodic grooves in-between to allow the listener to catch their breath.
Opening tracks ‘Don’t Look’ and ‘Release Me’ throw such force at the listeners that’s its hard to not stop and take notice of what your listening to. This opening crescendo is rounded off with their most recent single, and stand out track on the album, ‘I’m not your regular Women’, an explosion of anger and passion that really epitomises what the album is about.
Tracks like ‘Smiling Faces’ and ‘Be my Fela’ provide the counterweight to this album, with Be my Fela in particular offering a far funkier track that odes to early Afrobeat as much as it does to American soul.
It’s an album that, rather than offering something innovative, refreshes a sound perfected so well in Soul’s 50’s and 60’s heyday, proof that little innovation is still to this day needed to make a fantastic soul album. It’s certainly obvious that Stop. Look. Listen was the perfect name for the album, because that’s exactly what its makes you do.