“Revenue Retrievin’: Day Shift” “Revenue Retrievin’: Night Shift” “If I give you my love,” she sings, “are you gonna give it back?” You can almost see one hand planted on a jutting hip. “I’ve got better things to do than remember you,” she sings tartly in “Better Things.” Of course she does. Jones conveys emotions as blunt facts, through the sheer physical force of her singing, and it’s easier to believe her fury than her vulnerability. “Window Shopping” concerns a partner’s wandering eye the title track is about waking up to betrayal. (It arrived on the heels of the first American release by Amy Winehouse, largely recorded in the Daptone studio with many of the same musicians.) The new album sustains more of a plaintive air, with songs about eroded trust, exasperated patience and wounded indignation. They did, however, have a breakthrough hit in 2007 with “100 Days, 100 Nights,” an album of tight exuberance and proud conviction. Jones learned the hard way, it would seem, because she and the band do everything the hard way. Recorded on an eight-track tape machine, the music gives off a musk of enlightened toil. As is generally the case with a Daptone release, the album’s producer is Bosco Mann, the label founder and Dap-Kings bassist, who also goes by his real name, Gabriel Roth. The title doubles as a testimonial by Ms. “I Learned the Hard Way” is her fourth album with the Dap-Kings, and to say that it does nothing differently from its predecessors is essentially, among Daptone believers, high praise. As the voice of Daptone Records, Brooklyn’s own funk factory, she has devoted countless hours and an even greater share of kinetic energy to an evangelical task: the practice of a gritty, time-warped strain of R&B. The retro-soul queen Sharon Jones comes by her authority naturally, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t worked for it.
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