Pop Music Reviews : A Break in the Mighty Clouds

If anybody had the inside track on musical inspiration, you’d think it would be a gospel quartet. That goes double for one as noteworthy as the Mighty Clouds of Joy.

But in a performance Thursday that followed mighty clouds of rain across the Southland, the veteran quartet sang too often like modest patches of niceness.

A competent gospel group will elicit nods and murmurs of approval from the faithful, which the Grammy Award-winning foursome did several times through the 90-minute show to a less than capacity audience at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. But a great group in peak form will turn even the biggest skeptics around--or at least get them looking around seriously for the gate where the train to glory departs.

The Clouds approached that level of fervor just twice, both in the show’s second half.

The first was an extended workout on “Heavy Load,” in which founding lead singer Joe Ligon did some extemporized preaching over a vamped verse. That’s the Gospel 101 way to build intensity from a whisper to a scream, and Ligon seemed, unlike most of the night, to push himself to higher and higher vocal heights.

The other transcendent moment came, ironically, during a show-closing rendition of “Shout,” the Isley Brothers’ secularized R&B; version of a old-time gospel roof-raiser. The Irvine Barclay’s roof stayed securely in place, but at least the seats rattled a bit.

And when a woman took Ligon up on his invitation for audience members to join them on stage and do “the Holy Ghost shout,” she brought a spontaneity and genuine spark to the show that had been largely missing.

Several elements conspired against the quartet musically breaking free of this mortal coil. While the Irvine Barclay is a lovely venue for many types of performance, the air-conditioned comfort of a sit-down theater works against listeners from taking a more active role in the show. There’s nothing like a cheap plastic fold-up chair in a sweltering tent on a muggy Sunday morning to get folks up and testifying.

Additionally, the Clouds’ four-man backing band played as lifelessly as a Las Vegas show band in the third year of a five-year contract. Guitarist Little Joey Williams and keyboardist Alphonso McClain, in particular, looked for all the world as though they were toiling away stitching tongues into running shoes.

They provided little of the dynamic shading and lean-but-solid support that marks the best gospel backing bands. The lounge-bar-in-space piano sound McClain selected on his synthesizer didn’t help.

The music also suffered from an unflattering sound mix in which the instrumentalists often overwhelmed the vocalists. If the striations from soprano to bass cannot be distinguished, a gospel quartet is damned.

*

It’s not as if the Mighty Clouds don’t still possess the raw materials for something better. Ligon’s gruff roar provides the perfect counterpoint and dramatic tension against the silky high harmonies of the other Clouds: Richard Wallace, Wilbert Williams and Michael McCowin.

To be sure, flashes of brilliance shone through now and then, as with Williams’ stratospheric solo, reminiscent of Phillip Bailey, in “Walk Around Heaven All Day.”

What is so special about such gospel forbears as the Sensational Nightingales and contemporaries like the Five Blind Boys of Alabama or the Zion Harmonizers is how they can make every performance, even every song, a convincing expression of the divine.

The Clouds, by comparison, were all too earthbound. For one who’s made a career out of focusing his audience’s attention on the kingdom of heaven, Ligon spent an inordinate amount of time addressing such earthly concerns as their souvenir CDs, tapes and photos on sale in the lobby and extending warnings against unauthorized videotaping of the show.

Making this substandard performance even more disappointing are how rare it is that an ensemble of the stature of the Mighty Clouds visits Orange County and what a good year it’s been for male traditional gospel groups: The Blind Boys and the Fairfield Four both released albums for major labels in 1993, and the Mighty Clouds spent a high-profile month last fall appearing with Paul Simon at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Then again, nobody said gospel groups are perfect. After the inevitable off night, perhaps they just need to be forgiven.