+'Justments [Club 180g Ltd] [Vinyl]

Bill Withers' underappreciated 1974 masterpiece is the VMP Classics Record of the Month for August 2021. It's here on 180g black vinyl, remastered AAA from the original master tapes.

"For nearly four decades, Bill Withers’ '+’Justments' sat hidden in plain sight. It was beloved, and even deemed a masterpiece, by listeners in the know, and for a certain kind of music fan, one of those albums that could confirm you’re amongst your kind — the ones who venture beyond charts; the diggers and the excavators. But in 1974, when the album was released, the famed singer-songwriter was still at the height of his powers. He was already the Bill Withers who’d made “Ain't No Sunshine,” a prototype of lovelorn lament for its era, and “Grandma’s Hands,” an ode to matriarchal nurture. The Bill Withers who’d made “Lean On Me,” a monument to friendship that’s embedded in our cultural fibers. His songs were paradoxes, deceptively simple in the way they illuminated the interiority of the human experience, how they made the personal universal."

• Format: Vinyl
• Label: Sussex
• Genre: Funk / Soul