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The soul-revivalist game can be tricky — in its ’60s heyday, soul music was a matter of songs as much as it was a function of musicianship. Attempting to modernize soul usually means laboring to duplicate the style with songs that often sound like pastiches. This tendency has everything to do with the revivalist mentality, but Nashville’s Charles Walker and the Dynamites avoid it on their new full-length, Love Is Only Everything. The band cooks, while the originals contrast with a cover of Jerry Williams Jr. and Larry Harrison’s “Please Open Up the Door,” a tune Walker first cut in 1968 as singer with Little Charles and the Sidewinders. Love Is Only Everything blurs the distinction between soul and post-James Brown funk, but that’s revivalism for you.

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