This album is obviously known for its two big, slow, cover versions: Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Carole King‘s “Will you Still Love me Tomorrow?” And well they might be celebrated: they’re not just good, soulful renditions — they’re both devastating, shot through with personal feeling and a gospel sense of universality. The tempo practically never lifts above the glacial: covers of Aretha‘s “Sweet Bitter Love” and the Bee Gees‘ “To Love Somebody” are as explored with as much aching patience as the two big songs, for example. But there’s the opening “Go Up Moses” with its magisterial funk and unalloyed civil rights sentiment, and the gorgeous “Sunday and Sister Jones” which has almost as heavy a groove while somehow feeling delicate: the same kind of production/arrangement trick that Curtis Mayfield was perfecting at the same time. In a contemporary Village Voice review, Robert Christgau accused this album of “gratuitous gentility” — a shocking lapse in judgement. Yes, it is a record of the introspective 70s, of the era of Joni and Carly — but nonetheless it is soaked in the rawest, deepest, saddest, angriest elements of the blues, of funk, of soul, of gospel, and to properly listen to it is to be willing to succumb to all of that. Albums do not get much more bittersweet than this.