Demon Fuzz - Afreaka!

Demon Fuzz is another one of those bands whose freaky, forward-looking sounds were far enough ahead of their time that they achieved little success and remain obscure outside of crate-digging DJs continually in search of more esoteric and obscure grooves.  While ostensibly being a funk band, Demon Fuzz combines jazzy, menacing dissonance with prog and psych tendencies and a soulful backbone that keeps even the strangest moments grounded.  The opening instrumental, "Past Present and Future," opens with a muted guitar figure that could've been lifted from a Fugazi record twenty years in the future, shortly followed by the sly insinuation of horns and a martial rhythm that unfolds into full-on brass band swagger and then dissolves into a Fun House-era Stooges freakout.  The vocals don't arrive until track two, the spidery "Disillusioned," but aptly named crooner Smokey Adams expresses righteous anger over a bed of organ, harmonica, and buzzing trumpet.  There's a few more killer originals and covers of the mandatory "I Put a Spell on You" and a song from the British Invasion combo Electric Flag, rounded out with another expressionistic instrumental capper.  Truly freaky.

Mercy (variation 1)

Bob Ohiri & His Uhuru Sounds - Uhuru Aiye

Well, I need another breather from all the metal, so lets venture deep into Nigeria and visit with Bob Ohiri and his band. Primarily famous for playing guitar for the legendary Kind Sunny Adé, pioneer of the Jùjú genre, Ohiri breaks loose here and plays a forward-thinking brand of afrobeat colored with bop jazz and gritty funk. I don't have much of a clue as to what's gong on lyrically, as most of the songs are in Yoruba, but two of the English ones express a yearning for freedom and a cry for solidarity. Beyond that, the music is heavily percussive - there must be a dozen drummers and percussionists - and shot through with horn lines, quivering wah-wah, and layered background chants, producing a danceable but vaguely unsettling cacophony. Heady, sweaty stuff for a hot summer night.
Nigeria London Na Lagos

Babe Ruth - First Base

Today's special is another groovy slab of proggish proto-metal, from England's Babe Ruth. Staking their own unique little plot of sound with singer Janita Haan's Joplin-howl and some surprisingly pretty and lush strings in between more traditional bluesy skronk, this album is most notorious for the heavily-covered "The Mexican," but about every other song is a total killer rock number, and even the quieter ones tend to pick up steam towards the end. Plus, dig that crazy cover!
Have you seen a black dog's eyes
Staring in the fire?

Small Talk

Who'll pay reparations on my soul?

Rikki Ililonga - Soweto

Rikki Ililonga was a pioneer of the sound retroactively known as Zam-rock, fusing African rhythm and consciousness with psych rock, soul, and funk. His group Musi-O-Tunya was debatably the first to play in the style and perhaps the most varied and ambitious as well. Rikki possesses a sweet high tenor similar to Curtis Mayfield or Jimmy Cliff, and like those men his honeyed voice is used to convey dark, fiery political conviction and righteous anger, as well as more reflective self-examination and the occasional song of love. Crucial, heartbreaking work from a mysterious visionary, Soweto is a monument to a man who should have taken a seat in the pantheon of greats but remains mostly unheard and unknown.
You Got the Fire

James Brown - The Payback

Continuing with yesterday's theme, and similarly short on time, I give you James Brown's landmark double album The Payback. One can make the argument that soul and funk were almost exclusively singles-based forms until around this time, when expanding song length, thematic continuity, and sustained groove began to overtake radio readiness and the three-minute cap as artistic parameters. Either way, this is definitely Brown's first real Album, a collection of hard-driving, one-or-two-note riffs, a gaggle of back-up singers, and some cinematic experimentation. This shift also brought somewhat to the forefront Brown's burgeoning social conscience and identification with the Black Power movement, as evidenced by the cover art and the tagline “We got a right to the tree of life”.
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HUMAN SANTAPEDE

HO

BLO - Phase II

Well, wee one, it's still lashing snow and sleet against my window outside, still bone-chilling and grim, but let's try a different tactic than yesterday. One of psychedelia's earliest worldwide converts, Nigeria's BLO fused Cream-style power trio trippiness, James Brown's brand of lean funk, and their native rhythms into a sweaty, clattering whole. This is their second LP, obviously, heavier and funkier than the airy debut and less weird than the third, although side B does get pretty far out. This is a much different sound than the burgeoning Zamrock scene, nor is it connected to Fela Kuti's transcendental seance-funk or the Nuggets-style garage rock scene rumbling on the southern end of the continent. This is pure sub-Saharan alchemy, high-minded and loose-limbed. Only the funk can keep away the cold.
Whole Lotta Shit

Bo Diddley - Big Bad Bo

A thousand pardons, swamplings, but tonight finds your host unreasonably surly and uncharacteristically tight-lipped. Much fooferall has been made recently about Bo Diddley's "Black Gladiator" album, which fuses 60's psychedelia with the man's traditional gangsta rock braggadocio, as if it's the only record he ever released in the style, just because it's been recently re-released on vinyl and has a cool name. Here's an equally succinct LP in the same style. I'm having a hard time typing and pontificating, due to my throbbing headache and general misanthropy, so let's make this brief and to the point:
He's Got All My Whiskey

I promise not to be so foul-tempered in a couple of days, but just listen to this in the meantime. The wheels of the universe continue to spin; all will be right.

Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

Take a long, careful look at that cover: dub wizard Scientist and his monster-hunter crew tooling through the Swamp, blasting strange reggae music from his speakerboat to the horror and confusion of the array of classic Universal monsters that lurk there, doing who knows what. Present on this album are a morbid gallery of musical Frankenstein's monsters, thematically concerned primarily with vampires, mummies, and zombies, with occasional nods to other archetypes. Dub, like much music created on the fringes of cryptic subculture, is nigh-impossible to accurately describe, and similarly daunting to listen to for the uninitiated. Much of it is the aimless noodling of fried-minded headcases, but at its pinnacle it is transcendentally weird and can wreak permanent mental change upon the unsuspecting. If the stars are right, mayhaps this can happen to you.
Your Teeth In My Neck

Lalo Schifrin - Black Widow

Primarily known as a film composer whose works range from Mission: Impossible to Enter the Dragon, Argentine Lalo Schifrin also sporadically released strange albums of futuristic horror disco funk, sinister jazz, and further madness. This one, an especially dark and trippy album, features remakes of world-music standard "Quiet Village" and a startling funk version of the theme from Jaws dripping with wah guitar, among many percolating originals and cinematic snippets. Surely the heavy disco trappings will alienate many of you, but if you're willing to tolerate a little slap bass and hi-hat abuse there is much dark material to be mined here. The perfect soundtrack to a cocaine-induced heart attack and out-of-body experience.
Con Alma

Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits - Carmelita Sings!: Visions of a Rock Apocalypse

In anticipation of their upcoming tour after a mysterious lapse into silence for damn nigh on a decade, I present the more-than-full-length apocalyptic musical mindfuck album by Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, of San Francisco. Presumably they will have these for sale when you go see them, but it would be nice to have a copy beforehand so you can sing along with all the cool kids, yes? Rest assured, little seedling, that though it somehow seems like there's a million songs on here, and each one is funnier and more painfully, disturbingly true than the last, it's really only about 25 and the funniest one is "Child Killer" once the choir of 5-year-olds swells in the background to sing the chorus - it's enough to make the little vestigial hairs on your throat stand up and sway. Enough talk!
Dance!

Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band - This World (Is Going Up In Flames)

Well, this seems to be out of print, and the mp3s are available for free on the Daptone website, so this must be fair game, and a breath of freshly napalmed air after a long stretch of heavy metal. Charles Bradley is an old school soul singer of the James Brown/Lee Fields small-man-big-mouth school backed by an assortment of Daptone house musicians. The a-side is, as the title suggests, a dark Nostradamian prophecy of raining fire, red skies, and war all the time, punctuated by fierce horn bombardments and a rhythm section radioactive enough to melt your turntable (or, in this case, your tiny little computer speakers). Put on your gas mask and your dancing shoes, the end is nigh.
Lemme hear ya now.

Swamp Dogg - Rat On!

Here's the second album by perennial Swamp hero Swamp Dogg, whom I've expounded upon before at length here. The Dogg backs up somewhat from his post-apocalyptic version of soul to tackle more down-to-earth topics such as war and sex. The highlight of the album is the mighty cry for revolution, "God Bless America For What?" a heartbreaking reaction to the war in Vietnam and the Nixon regime. Most of the rest of the songs concern themselves with matters of the heart and other organs.
Do You Believe?

The Undisputed Truth - Cosmic Truth

The Norman Whitfield era of the Temptations is generally regarded of as the dawn of psychedelic soul music, fueled equally by LSD, Cold War paranoia, the Civil Rights movement, and the young psych rock scene. The Temptations, however, were still under pressure to be hit-makers, and Whitfield could only push the envelope so far while satisfying Motown's commercial standard. Not so with his other project, The Undisputed Truth. Hand-selected by Whitfield from the label's vast legions of semi-anonymous background singers and utilizing the same back-up musicians on the more famous Temps albums, and freed from pressure to make hits, the collaboration reached out farther into space than any had journeyed before. This third album was the first to really embrace the wild energy of the burgeoning psych scene and run with it. The first song, the aptly named "Earthquake Shake," is a monster bass riff, and thunderous drum line, and a chorus of bellowing, whooping aliens. The second is a funktified cover of Neil Young's "Down By the River," all eleven minutes of it. The third song is about UFOs. This album, too, was the debut of what became the group's signature look: Huge silver afro wigs and silver face paint.
Face the Truth

Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction to Your Mind

Good evening, precious ones, and pardon my brief absence from the Swamp - I was called into the loathesome fringe of civilization on some unfinished business. Fear not, though, for I return with gifts! I present to you the first and most startling album by Post-Apocalyptic Libertarian Sci-Fi Soul Brother Swamp Dogg, the aptly titled Total Destruciton to Your Mind. The wild-eyed futuristic alter-ego of soul producer Jerry Williams, Swamp Dogg stood out from the hordes of 70's musical hustlers and players in a number of ways: first, in his disdain for consumerism, expressed here in the track "Synthetic World," a dystopian shopping fantasy on par with X-Ray Spex or the Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket." Secondly, in his vocal and active opposition to both the Vietnam war and the domestic war on drugs, which earned him a high-ranking spot on Nixon's enemies list. Thirdly, his strict self-reliant ethic - he lives and publishes his own albums to this day, in addition to producing hundreds of albums for other artists (most of which were primarily comprised of songs he wrote). Fourthly, his eerie visions of the coming apocalypse, which pepper his albums up until the end of the seventies, but most succinctly and jaw-droppingly on this album's centerpiece, "The World Beyond." Swamp Dogg continues to fight the war on greed, hypocrisy, and unfunkiness. Join him.
It's just a little time left.

Fela Kuti - Zombie

Perhaps the seminal work of Fela Kuti, Nigeria's cross between James Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, Zombie works on several simultaneous levels: as a hypnotic, trance-inducing meditation; a sharp-tongued but subtle decrying of his country's government and military, a horror story of voodoo re-animation, and a blistering funk record. Four songs, none of them shorter than twelve minutes, flowing together in a liquid bath of horn stabs and poly-rhythms. It functions much like the doom metal albums enshrined herein: as a long-form dark poem which rises and falls but in which the tide never goes all the way out, lapping at the shores of your subconscious. This album, upon release, sparked a series of riots in Lagos in which Kuti's compound was invaded and his elderly mother was defenestrated. In protest, he dragged her coffin to the courthouse and, bizarrely, on the first anniversary of the attack he married 27 women in her remembrance.
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