[rating=3.50]
The Budos Band has been playing their brand of “Afro Soul” since 2005, where they’ve recorded at their label’s own studio, Daptone’s House of Soul, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their brand of Afro Soul can best be described as “Ethiopian music with a soul undercurrent to it, sprinkled with a little bit of sweet 60’s stuff on top.
The band’s third full-length studio effort was conceived during weekly, beer-fueled Staten Island writing sessions as well as more than 150 live gigs over the last two years and recorded during a 48 hour period in January 2010. The result is a concoction of eleven songs that mix the jubilant feel of Fela Kuti with the funky playfulness that the Beastie Boys plastered together on their recent instrumental albums. Mix that with the rhythmic force of congas, bongos, cowbells aboard the punchy horns and you got a full on blaxploitation sound-track minus the irony. While it still fills us with the same predictable energy we can expect from the Daptones label, The Budos Band are nonetheless solid at what they do even if its making a Beatles song their own by spelling it backwards (“Rippirt Yad”). It’s not all a backwards affair as The Budos Band sucker punch you throughout their eleven songs, successfully rejoicing the new soul revival and Fela’s recent Broadway prominence.
