Music Reviews: Funk

For a quick musical pick me up you can't beat War. The group was born during Vietnam war time and now with this release and others, has another lease on jazz-funk life during more war time. Has there ever been a time without it? The story behind the group is at least as interesting as the music is invigorating, so much fun and on top of it all, super-well recorded.If you're of a certain age you remember these catchy as crabs cowbell infected tunes blaring... Read More

What are woo doing this Record Store Day? There’s always something to please almost everyone each year. One of my shopping strategies is to try to find something unique, containing music that hasn’t been heard before; I appreciate when an artist - or, their team - waits for this special annual shopping moment to drop some music that the world hasn’t yet heard; it makes it an event. This year, the record release that falls on that side of my barometer is Bernie... Read More

In the mid-2000s, Kaiser Chiefs finally exploded onto the post-punk revival scene. After a failed attempt in the music business as Parva, they scrapped everything to forge ahead with a new musical voyage. In a musical climate dominated by American groups like The Strokes and The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs provided a strong British influence, borrowing elements from Britpop and 70s punk rock. The group’s ability to craft stadium anthems, such as “I Predict A Riot” and the... Read More

ORG Music continues their rollout of selections from the Westbound Records catalog that have been remastered and reissued on vinyl for the first time in several decades with a rare release from later in the label’s history, Eramus Hall’s, Your Love is My Desire (1980). Armen Boladian founded Detroit’s Westbound Records 1968 and it became a soul and funk dynamo, especially during the years following Motown’s exodus from Motor City. ORG’s series recently included the... Read More

Many classic albums are lauded as “singular” and “groundbreaking,” but after a while don’t really sound like it, because everyone afterwards did it, or we realize that someone lesser-known did it six months earlier. Yet 52 years later, Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On remains as singular and confounding as ever; nothing remotely like it existed before, and nothing since has done exactly what it does. It remains impenetrable and unique: while its elements have scattered throughout popular and underground music since, Sly Stone's early 1970s work operates in a manner that’s impossible to plagiarize because exactly what makes it work is much harder to pinpoint.

What's unusual here is not the big band. James Brown toured and recorded with one throughout his career. "Soul On Top" is an outlier in the Brown catalog because he's backed by a jazz band— Louie Bellson's 18 piece orchestra—with arrangements by Oliver Nelson, who tried to conduct. Only saxophonist Maceo Parker, Jr. from Brown's band The J.B.s came along for the ride.Brown's 28th album, released in 1970 on King Records (KS1100) was... Read More