When the James Taylor Quartet are on their game, laying down guitar lines right out of the Melvin Sparks songbook ("3 Mile Island") or pounding out sweat-drenched B3 gems (the title-track), they create amazingly evocative music, as their unforgettable acid-tinged version of Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" proves. But then vocals appear and all that carefully-crafted mood flies right out the window in a breeze of quiet-storm-styled soul. Sometimes you just have to take the great with the mediocre, and that's the case with In the Hand of the Inevitable. --Percy Keegan