The Four Tops I'm In A Different World Gimme your impressions

[Sotosound]

Levi sounds like he is on the verge of tears even tho it is a happy song. This hurt the song.

He's actually being pushed to the very top of his register in a slightly less-appealing-than-normal way.

If I have a slight criticism of Motown it's that they tended to push Levi's vocals to the top of his register even when it wasn't the best thing to do, and sometimes even to the point of those vocals losing any emotional subtlety.

Not long after, the same thing happened again with "What Is A Man" and, to my ears, the vocal strain is unpleasantly evident again.

H-D-H largely got away with it, and extracted some absolutely cracking performances but, to my ears, later tracks like "What Is A Man" and "I Am Your Man" are harmed by this approach.

This was much less the case when the Tops went to Dunhill. Instead, Levi got to really sing, and we could hear a gorgeous richness in his baritone voice that often went unheard at Motown.

It was even less the case when they went to Casablanca and recorded such tracks as "I Believe In You And Me", where we hear a vastly different, more nuanced and much better vocal style from Levi, moving from baritone to falsetto and back again, plus a little tenor-register roar near the end.

[Motown Eddie]

He's actually being pushed to the very top of his register in a slightly less-appealing-than-normal way.

If I have a slight criticism of Motown it's that they tended to push Levi's vocals to the top of his register even when it wasn't the best thing to do, and sometimes even to the point of those vocals losing any emotional subtlety.

H-D-H pushed Levi's voice to the top of his range on most of the classic singles that The Tops did during the '60s. It worked for those songs [and gave them an edge] but it didn't work as well for lesser songs like "What Is A Man" that were recorded after H-D-H left the company. Also both Marvin Gaye & David Ruffin were pushed to the top of their vocal ranges on songs like Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" and The Tempts' "Ain't Too Proud To Beg".