With Gabriel (Bosco Mann) Roth at the helm, Naomi and company went into the studio Summer 2013, and cut onto tape what can only be described as bonafide Soul Excitement of the highest order! At the heart of it, Cold World is a Soul record but the cross section of sub-genres the album weaves through makes it difficult to label it plainly as such. There are tracks like ‘Sinner’, ‘Heaven Is Mine’, and ‘Humble Me’ that capture the group’s penchant for Soul grooves, seasoned with Naomi’s tough vocal delivery, and the Queens melodic interplay, which captures perhaps better than any of the other tracks, NSGQ’s live show. Then there’s some hard funk by way of ‘Bound for the Promised Land’, ‘Cold World’, and ‘Thank You Lord’ - the percolating church rave-up of ‘Get Up, Child’, the country heavy ‘One Day’, and ‘I Earned Mine’, and the bouncing rumba of ‘Everybody Knows.' This album is a menagerie of Soul music at its finest, untied by the strong message-laden lyrics. Trust us, the wait was worth it.
