It has been around ten years since Curtis Harding showed his debut album Soul Power, as future -oriented soul could sound in the 21st century. Not according to nostalgic indulgence, but actually as a sound for the here and now, but also for the morning and maybe even the day after tomorrow. He now continues this story with his fourth album – which this time even lifts thematically into space. “Space is the place”, Sun Ra always said, and Harding is now striving to tell Captain Curt.
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But he did not find his place in space, but has been lost on his journey through the infinity of the universe and is now desperately looking for his way home. With the cosmos, this odyssey promises fewer encounters of the third species than rather very romanticism, as on the “Hard As Stone” carried by strings, in which Harding’s voice sounds distorted after a drunken Marsmännchen.
And if you don’t run to the dance floor with his Spacey choirs with his distorted retro guitar solos or with the shimmering and glittering “True Love Can’t BE Blind” with his Spacey choirs. Hardly anyone knows better to translate classic soul into the sound of the present, that shows Curts Harding again with Departures & Arrivals.
This review first appeared in the MusikExpress 10/2025.