If you liked funk in the 70s then this is right up your alley and in my opinion, it's good stuff. It does not quite thrill me like funk did way back then, but of course in those days funk was new on the scene and I was lot younger aswell, so the tendency to get up and shake my tail feather (in a completely embarrassing way) was a good deal greater than it is now. Even so, this record is genuinely funky and it is instrumented in much the way things were back then, so you hear the clavinet, and some scratchy sounding strats and all the rest of them doing their funky thing just how they did back then. So I reckon with a couple of drinks inside me and the right atmosphere this would get me up.
But, at the risk of boring your underwear clean into the next dimension, where this recornd is different than a 70s record is that this album was produced digitally - and that makes a big difference to the feel.
Even though they have tried to roughen it up with background vinyl crackle and turntable rumble mixed way the hell down there on some tracks and even though it has been soft clipped when it was mastered to try to make it sound a bit more like tape - it just isn't, and you can hear it big time. The rough edges that you got in the 70 are missing, the tempo stays rigid and bang on the mark all the way through instead of moving around as it will with a really tight band, and the instruments stay politely separate from each other instead of layering up and making a texture. All of this is tolerable, but what I really miss are the unintentional variations the musicians invariably made when doing a live recording back the days and which almost always hit the mark musically. In the digital production environment those little variations tend to be heard very starkly by the engineer and 9 times out of 10 he just can't resist the urge to edit them out - and it is this that makes the music a bit too "perfect" and just that little bit sterile. Even though it is a subtle matter and even though it might sound all very technical when I write it here, belive me when I say your ears and your feet will can definitely know the difference.
By contrast, if you go to the right places in London on the right night you will hear the funk played red-hot-and-human without a clean-up or a metronome anywhere in hearing distance - and that my friends will have your heart beating fast and you body feeling alive in a very big way.
So this record is right around where I want the music to be and it has allthe right elements, I just want less perfection and more of the jam.
Adrian