24 Carat Black
Gone: The Promises Of Yesterday LP vinyl

The second album by The 24 Carat Black remained an unfinished and almost forgotten project for decades. The recordings spent 35 years in a basement on Chicago’s South Side, in the possession of keyboardist and session engineer Bruce Thompson. Warren eventually abandoned the album when the studio expenses became too great, and the tapes continued to deteriorate over the years. By the time they were recovered, dampness had reduced much of the material to an unusable state, leaving just six tracks that could be preserved for this release.

What emerged from those surviving recordings was something quite different from Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Gone – The Promises Of Yesterday was never intended as a continuation of that album’s bleak reflections on the hardships of inner-city life. Instead, it presents a darker, more intimate and sensual side of Warren’s work, built around reworked love songs that he had originally written as far back as 1965, during his time as a songwriter at Shrine and Motown.

The project may have remained incomplete, but the surviving fragments still reveal an exceptionally clear artistic vision. Even through the damaged tapes and skeletal arrangements, Warren’s attempt to reinvent himself remains unmistakable. What comes through is a deeply personal expression of one man’s place within Black culture—an artistic vision that may have been mishandled and misunderstood for decades, but can finally be appreciated with a little more clarity.

NEW /  Released in 2009 / Reissued 

Tracklist:

A1 The Best Of Good Love Gone

A2 I Want To Make Up

A3 I Don't Love You

A4 I'll Never Let You Go

B1 Gone The Promises Of Yesterday

B2 I Begin To Weep