Twelve years! Hard to believe that it has been twelve years since Alyson Williams' last album was released on Columbia. There had been some guest appearances on other musicians' albums like Marcus Johnson's Chocolate City Groovin' or on Miles' The Odyssey and Alyson also did a great cover version of Rashaan Patterson's Spend The Night on the Club 1600 album by Rex Rideout. She also has been featured in several on and off-Broadway musicals. But of course these contributations were only pale (and on the whole expensive) surrogates of a full-length album. (By the way you can find Alyson's discography on musik-datenbank.de).
The good news is that the wait is over and the woman, who brought the soul to Def Jam Recordings in 1989 with her debut album Raw (that featured hits like Just Call My Name, My Love Is So Raw or Sleep Talk), is finally back after twelve years! Oh, I guess I've already told you about the long hiatus :-) And her voice hasn't lost its magic inbetween.
The aptly titled It's About Time is originally released on Marcus Johnson's Three Keys Music label and thus it's more or less a result of Alyson's work on Marcus' albums. After the Carmen Rodgers album Expansion Records have again licensed a fine record to bring us an UK and European release.
After such a long time Alyson could've come back with singing the telephone book of her home town and fans would buy it just to hear her sing again. But of course Alyson gives us much more than that.
The idea behind It's About Time is a collection of songs that tell a love story from meeting to the first obstacles to the breakup and the pain this can cause. The result is a good modern-day soul album without being neo soul or paying too much attention to what's hip today. It's more like Alyson hasn't been away such a long time [yes, twelve years, I'm sure you know it by now :-)] and continues where she left with songs like Can't Have My Man or Everybody Knew But Me from her second album.
The opener Soft And Warm is a good example of this continuation, a brilliant midtempo soul song that finds Alyson on the seductive side.
There are two duets on this album with another veteran singer. On Tomorrow and A Sexy Way Alyson teams up with Tony Terry (who returned some time ago with My Best).
Alyson also adds her magic to Simply Red's Holding Back The Years, a song I only started to like when Angie Stone covered it for the Love & Basketball soundtrack. Alyson gives this song a relaxed jazzy-soul vibe. For some slow dancing action with your partner there's also the Steppers Delight Remix available as a bonus track.
Songs like Make It Through The Night, No More or Strangers add further proof to Alyson's reputation as an impressive soul singer.
To sum it up It's About Time is a very good and welcome return for Alyson Williams onto the music scene and let's just hope we don't have to wait another twelve years for the successor.