Saturday, February 4, 2012

Album of the Day: Soulive - Up Here


I bought the vinyl, mostly because the album art was pretty. There is a lot of live instrumentation here, which you don't hear very often anymore. 'Too Much' would fit right in on an Aloe Blacc album, with its soul rhythms and socially conscious (as much as I hate the term) lyrics. 'PJ's' slows the tempo down considerably in comparison to the rest of the album, with a nice, slow blues beat that provides a fantastic contrast to the other songs here, and the album ends with a great cover of 'Prototype.' Now that I think of it, I don't think I can name a single funk artist/album from the last decade without the help of Google. In that regard, I enjoyed this simply because of the novelty: what happens when you take a decades-old (but still fantastic) genre and infuse it with a bit more of a modern style? The answer, it seems, is a set of music that leans more heavily toward the old school than the new, but has a few quirks thrown in, such as prominent electric guitar rhythms ('The Swamp', 'Backwards Jack'), and relatively shorter songs, at least for instrumentals. 

No comments:

Post a Comment