Eli 'Paperboy' Reed: Come and Get It

Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album was such a perfect simulacrum of 60s soul that it's easy to assume every blue-eyed soul singer to have followed was influenced by her sound and/or success. Boston's 26-year-old Eli "Paperboy" Reed may feel he has more of a connection to the source material – he moved to the Mississippi Delta as a teenager – but Come and Get It mines a similar vein of 1960s Stax records and early Motown. Everything here is expertly performed, and Reed has a raspy, yearning voice that recalls Wilson Pickett, or on the breathless Just Like Me, a rougher Marvin Gaye, but too much feels like soul by numbers. Opener Young Girl and the title track are breezy, horn-drenched love songs that would sound perfect on Radio 2, while the aptly titled Explosion – complete with squealing guitars and pounding drums – provides an example of what could have been. This paperboy delivers, but unfortunately it's old news.