In the era of the Blaxploitation soundtrack, everyone’s favorite soul, jazz, and funk musicians were putting out albums at a pace to keep up with the furious release schedule of the films. Bobby Womack, Herbie Hancock, James Brown and a host of others all found themselves with records that, in many cases, far surpassed the impact of the films they scored. Maybe none more than Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man.

The 1972 crime film could have easily been less than a footnote of the Blaxploitation genre if it wasn’t for Gaye’s atmospheric soundtrack. There’s something about the sound of Gaye’s voice, high and fragile — no, not fragile — vulnerable on the title track, that marks this as something different. It’s real and human in a way that soundtracks often aren’t. Other tracks on the album, notably “Deep in It” and “Don’t Mess With Mr. T,” play with synths in a way that creates a tight, almost claustrophobic sense of foreboding that works with or without having seen the movie it accompanies (a movie that, at the time, was called  “a grade B attempt to tap the cash flow that had been generated by Shaft”  and “another of those films that should have never left the editing room”). And the track “Cleo’s Apartment” has the sort of complex, almost tormented sexiness that Gaye does so well, you wonder if it wasn’t a warm-up track for “Let’s Get It On.” Even Gaye knew he had something special, telling an interviewer in 1974, “I wasn’t supposed to do the soundtrack the way it came out, I was supposed to do a stock soundtrack in the mold of all the movie soundtracks that had been coming out.”

Marvin Gaye took a sophisticated and urbane approach to his soundtrack for 1972’s Trouble Man, producing a mix of orchestrated soul-jazz and cutting-edge synth-flavoured funk with plenty of jazz influences and a moody film-noir feel. Trouble Man is intimate and intense, romantic at some points and futurist at others with a high quality level throughout. Understandably overshadowed by its release between the two soul classics What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On, Trouble Man is a worthy member of Marvin Gaye’s 1970s classic album run.