Complete your Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings collection.

Give the People What They Want is the fifth studio album by American soul and funk band Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, released January 14, 2014 on Daptone Records. The album was nominated for "Best R&B Album" at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards. Give the People What They Want garnered generally positive reception from music critics.

For Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, 2013 was a year of unforeseen challenges and transformations.

The latest by retro-soul queen Sharon Jones opens on bass-drum thunder and orchestral chimes, like an Ennio Morricone fanfare for a lawman returned to settle scores. That’s appropriate for Jones, who’s been battling pancreatic cancer but sounds utterly unbowed. Retreat! is a funky warning to a cocky suitor, and Making Up and Breaking Up is all echo-chamber slow groove and girl-group backing vocals, sublime in period accuracy and in-the-moment passion

The more albums Sharon Jones releases with the Dap-Kings, the more formulaic their structure appears. This is the group's fifth and, like its predecessors, it draws up a list of vintage-soul styles and methodically ticks each box. Opener Retreat! is their strident, fire-cracking, Motown-heyday tune, Jones's voice scratchy with scorn. No matter how contrived the sound, however, there's no writing this troupe off as lazy pastiche: like Amy Winehouse's Back to Black – on which the Dap-Kings were backing band – Give the People What They Want breathes passionate new life into the past.

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings were an American funk and soul band signed to Daptone Records. They were part of a revivalist movement recreating mid-1960s to mid-1970s style funk and soul music. In December 2014, the band was nominated for a Grammy, in the category Best R&B Album of the Year for Give the People What They Want. Sharon Jones died in 2016, with the band releasing the posthumous final album Soul of a Woman in 2017.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings Definitely Give The People What They Want. Ask an older generation of listeners and many would question the authenticity of modern R&B music. My more youthful, liberal side enjoys modern R&B – indulges if you will – even if it supplants substance with sex, drugs, etc. That said, my more refined, old soul yearns for true, legit soul, recalling the forefathers and veterans of the genre. With many of the veterans passed on or past their musical primes, the question becomes where does the ‘soul’ come from? The answer is from.

Jones’s anger toward increasing economic disparity is certainly infectious. Give the People What They Want occasionally explores alienation in a defeatist tone, but the majority of the album is focused on exerting control. Erotic Reruns is a collection of ultimately benign love songs, as the eroticism proposed by the album’s title is glaringly absent across 29 scant minutes.

Her natural ebullience still drives the splendid Give the People What They Want, a hook-laden affair keeping up the high standard set by I Learned the Hard Way and 2011’s punchy Soul Time!, as good an R&B album as any in recent years. The bullish attitude is there right from the opening Retreat!, an assertive blend of Motown snap, Stax horns and Spector chimes in a retro-soul cocktail: Step back! she warns, I’ll make you wish you were never born, and you don’t doubt her candour.