Review: Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats ignite in L.A.

By the end of their top-to-bottom joyous neo-soul revue Thursday in Los Angeles, Denver-based Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats had fully earned the right to have a member of their stage crew come out with a velvet cape, drape it over frontman Rateliff’s perspiration-soaked torso and gently usher him offstage, the way Godfather of Soul James Brown’s shows always used to end.

The fact that Rateliff chose not to make that direct homage to one of the many soul and R&B titans whose music has informed his own was just one of many smart moves that keeps the Denver-based singer and songwriter from disappearing into the shadow of his celebrated predecessors.

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With his just released album “Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats,” the musician who spent the last decade playing introspective indie folk music without igniting much critical mass has suddenly become one of 2015’s bright new arrivals.

At 36, Rateliff is no wunderkind, but the dues he’s paid, disappointments he’s weathered and life experience he’s gained along the way clearly are working to his, and our, great advantage. He comes across as a man who has felt the weight of the world on his broad shoulders, but one who has discovered the secret to singing and dancing those cares away.

He and his potent seven-piece band, including a meaty three-piece horn section, drew primarily from that album, opening with the album’s first track, “I Need Never Get Old,” a title that syncs up perfectly with the sense of eternal vitality in the ‘60s-rooted sound they mine.

It starts with an insistent beat and inviting guitar-keyboard-bass riff as tasty as anything Booker T. & the MG’s cooked up in their prime working at Memphis’ Stax Records.

Not coincidentally, the recently revived label that specialized in a grittier, tougher brand of R&B than most of what came out of Detroit’s Motown Records is the same one that signed Rateliff and released the album.

Rateliff looks like a character straight out of “Duck Dynasty,” with his beefy stature and chest-length beard, but he’s as light and elegant on his feet as Brown, Marvin Gaye and even Michael Jackson were before him, minus any hints of moonwalking.

What makes Rateliff’s take on vintage R&B more than a distant echo of a once-vital strain of American pop music is his lyrics, which bring myriad nuances of interpersonal relationships into the musical equation.

The marriage of a melancholy lyric with upbeat music can result in an exceptionally rich song, and that’s one of the hallmarks of Rateliff’s new vision for his music.

This all culminated in the band’s breakout hit single, “S.O.B.,” which recently left late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon so enamored that he was unable to restrain his enthusiasm when the group performed it on his show last month.

The lyric carries a gut-wrenching plea from a man wrestling with addiction, and a broken heart isn’t helping him win the fight. But the gospel-rooted music is so fundamentally exuberant you can’t help but root for him as he shouts, “If I can’t get clean/I’m gonna drink my life away.”

“S.O.B.” is that flawless, once-in-a-blue-moon melding of supercharged summer rave-up, audience singalong and ideal exit song that a band can vamp on into the night while the audience begs for more. That’s just what happened at the 1,200-capacity Regent Theatre downtown on Thursday.

Indeed, fans reinitiated the song’s irresistible “whoa-oh!” chorus after Rateliff bid them farewell and followed the rest of the band offstage. Soon, the musicians returned, picked up the beat and revved up the celebration once again, then deftly shifted the emphasis from the two and four beats back to one and three and glided effortlessly into a signature song from another key influence, delivering the Band’s “The Shape I’m In” masterfully, before returning one last time to the chorus of “S.O.B.”

It was validation of the sentiment Rateliff expressed in a recent interview with The Times when he said, “I don’t know why soul music ever went away in the first place.”

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