Customer Reviews

Defunkt/Defunkt + Thermonuclear Sweat

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is high energy, earthy, intelligent, players (i.e., non-mechanical) funk. The grooves are deep, tight, and supple (brilliant bassist Kim Clarke doesn't play repetitive patterns over and over again), the lyrics aren't your run-of-the-mill party stuff ("I need loud music/to keep quiet/a piece of ass/for piece of mind/heart keeps the beat and I keep breathing/gave up a lot but I won't give in", "You looked at me as if you had no eyes/and when you touched me I had no skin/I made love to a photocopy/and left your room in perfect order/by leaning out of my window/and travelling by ambulance", "I got dreams/riding in a spaceship/turning the controls/heading for outer galaxies/escaping culmination/from a burning earth"), but it'll make your body dance while your mind contemplates some of life's complexities (end of the world, love, addictions, etc).

This is a celebratory snapshot of the last golden age of hipster/junkie life in downtown NYC before the yuppies gentrified it out of existence.

Nothing else like it.

I'd give this album 50 STARS!!! I grew up on this band in NYC part of the downtown Jazz Funk scene of the late 70's and early 80's that included other artists like Ronald Shannon Jackson and James Blood Ulmer as well. But, Defunkt were THE KINGS of the groove. Their live shows were INTENSE to absolutely COSMIC dimensions. Kinda like James Brown reincarnated as JAZZ. The funk guitar playing as well as the rock solid grooves and awesome horns left us drenched in sweat from dancing so hard everytime we saw them. I gotta lotta love for this band. This CD is a combination of their first 2 albums and some extras including a 12" and some live cuts. God Bless You Joe Bowie!!!

Defunkt is probably the best funk band you never heard in your life. These guys were jazz musicians who flowered from the early 1980s downtown New York scene . Joe Bowie was Lester's-Art Ensamble Of Chicago-brother, and Melvin Gibbs one of the most dexterous bassists around: later worked with musicians as varied as Henry Rollins and Catano Veloso.

Such a musical DNA pool has an impact on this funkiest of funk. Horns blast, cymbals snap, the bass pops and slides. There is an extreme busyness to this music-brass clusters that border on free playing, extremely intricate bass patters filled with sixteenth note runs, and neck ranging slides.

If lesser musicians tried to pull this off, it would be a complete flash disaster. But Defunkt are so in the eternally in the pocket, such masters of the tone of their instruments, they make what would be gloss indulgence from most others and turn it into rich, layered, substance

But this is funk, and all the visceral assshake and soul of the music is in 1000% tact--it is just more thick, more detailed.

Play this on the stereo, though, and more likely than thinking of jazz nuances and the different take Defunkt has on their genre, you will be shaking your hips, and most everything else, loud, for a long, long time