Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week he is on vacation, so he got Andrew Noz to do it for him. Noz chose Joi Gilliam’s Tennessee Slim Is The Bomb. Read his thoughts on the album after the jump.

Regular Schnipper is in Mexico. I am your Guest Schnipper. My primary qualification for the position is that I’ve slept on Schnipper’s couch more times than I can remember (it ain’t his fault that my moms got fed up!) so forgive me for lacking any sort of formal experience in personal minutiae music blogging. Like a certain Broad Street Bully, I don’t do much and the memories of my few quirky anecdotes have been obscured by alcohol and Parkway Pumpin’ catalog numbers and lyrics about getting blacker in Geo Trackers. But I will give it a shot because me and Schnipzilla go back like recliners and triggers. (It’s a little known fact that recliners and triggers have a sordid and intertwined history.)

Certified baddest bitch Joi Gilliam goes back even further than that. She knows Madonna and Outkast and uh Fishbone and Dallas Austin. Personally. But her largest paycheck likely came from having the song “Lick” awkwardly shoehorned into that probably horrible Vin Diesel movie XXX. The reason I know this is that my friend Jon was once really excited about this film in a completely earnest way and insisted that I watch the dvd with him. I drank two bottles of Mickeys before the screening, so all I remember was the presence of said Joi song. And that Jon wore a robe for some reason. “Lick,” which isn’t on the particular record that you slept on but the previous one, samples Laid Back’s “White Horse.” I once got into an argument about the meaning of that song in a Delaware pizza parlor. Actually now that I think of it, it might’ve have been an Arby’s and not a pizza parlor. Either way, Tennessee Slim Is The Bomb, the actual slept on of the day, may be the only soul album that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since eating that roast beef sandwich.

On “Gravity” Joi sings about how the rap game stole her ex-husband Big Gipp (of Goodie Mob) and how the whole ordeal makes her want to go to Cal ah forn i a. But then she couldn’t have stayed mad at the rap game for all that long because its aging southern representatives Pastor Troy and Bun B turn up on “Say Say Li’l Fine Ass Niggah” and talk about doing all sorts of filthy shit to her. (They are both outshined by a rapper named Trauma Black. His verse is something like “What’s Your Fantasy” if it was ghost written by Dr. Seuss: “Have you ever fucked in the car? Fucked in the pool? Fucked on the bar? Fucked in the rain? Fucked in the snow? Fucked on the ceiling? Fucked on the flo’?” except replace all the f words with dramatic clips of Joi moaning.) In between these songs (and all the songs) “Uncle” George Clinton delivers a string of nigh indecipherable rants about relationships. But suffering through his crackheadicisms is worth your while, as great soul music is more about pain than passion.

The same could be said about great blogging.

And, in both cases, it helps if you can remember the details.