Lavine Hudson has one of those "great" voices that announce themselves as such from the first time you hear them and thus brook no resistance. Unquestionably the pupil of many a well-taught voice lesson, Hudson enunciates, swoops, and soars with more than enough accuracy and enthusiasm that it would ordinarily take to elevate a woman to Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston status. What might prevent such an elevation, alas, is Hudson's gospel orientation, the lone remaining victim of prejudice in an industry that never tires of proclaiming its devotion to "free speech."
Not that the many hits of Amy Grant, the genre hits of Bebe and Cece Winans, and the one-hit-wonder hits of Michael W. Smith and Kathy Troccoli should be pooh-poohed as meaningless aberrations; more meaningful aberrations you won't find, at least not on the radio. But the fact remains that this high-quality debut, recorded for Virgin Records, is having to rely for its U.S. distribution on Sparrow Records because Virgin doesn't know how to market the music of a young, talented, sexy black woman who mentions God in four of her album's twelve songs.
And despite Sparrow's excellent record of making sure that the best of today's young Black Gospel performers get the finest production and distribution money can buy, they've yet to chart their first top 40 hit, which means that, for the time being, Lavine Hudson will remain as unreal to the average kid on the block as, say, the Velvet Underground.
Hence, the significance of the album's title, a title that one can interpret several ways. First, Two Worlds refers to heaven and earth, obviously. Here and there, Hudson sings of the tension resulting from what St. Augustine might have called the dual citizenship of the believer. Second, Two Worlds refers to Europe, where Virgin has promoted this, and the U.S., where, as we've already seen, they have not. Third, Two Worlds means ccm and pop. These songs partake liberally of elements of both, thereby achieving a synthesis that serves as a formal and, at times, emotional impetus. Fourth, Two Worlds refers to Hudson's black audience and white audience. Like Carey and Houston, and for that matter Anita Baker and Deniece Williams, Hudson takes the verbal and musical vocabularies of soul and runs them through a multi-format filter. Fifth, Two Worlds refers to her "liberal" and "conservative" tendencies. She dedicates "Turned Away" to "the homeless" and claims in another song that "a little sensitivity" is all she needs "to show;" yet she stops short, for instance, of issuing any left-wing manifestoes, often choosing, in fact, phrases of gospel adoration so commonplace as to verge on the trite.
None of which matters, really. All one really needs to know is that for those enamored of today's pop divas and the sparkly production values they embrace, Between Two Worlds will make exceptional foreground listening and, for everyone else, exceptional background listening. And certainly someone, among strict separatists especially, should find it interesting that Phil Collins and Lamont Dozier wrote the best song here.
4/5
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