Sola Rosa - Get It Together (2009)

Summer’s coming in New Zealand, and I have found the perfect summer album. It is five years old, released in 2009, but as a music blogger things often come to my attention late, especially when you consider the vast amount of music there is floating around. But in the case of this seriously funky album by New Zealand collective Sola Rosa, the late coming has definitely been worth it.

Sola Rosa, led by Andrew Spraggon, as a collective has been around the music scene in New Zealand for over ten years exploring and creating a vast array of melodic and groove based sounds. Their music tends to follow a fusion pattern, mixing together more styles than you can count on two hands, including hip hop, jazz, reggae, soul and funk, something that features strongly on this album Get It Together. New Zealand seems to be a melting pot for these types of musical collectives, especially in the past ten years with bands such as Sola Rosa, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Trinity Roots and the Black Seeds pioneering an experimental fusion style of music, but also a no fear approach to composing music where anything is possible and any style can be mixed together. I guess this is also why many of these acts have had great success outside of New Zealand and why their music can often relate to many different types of music fan.

As for the songs on Get it Together, well the album kicks off with the very funky “The Ace Of Space”, a song which has an infectious bass groove, some pretty cool scratch work, as well as splattering’s of strings and horns. This is followed by “Turn Around” which features Iva Lamkum on vocals who does a nice job on this up-tempo R&B track. “Del Ray” is a sort of middle-eastern sounding track, especially in the horn riff which dominates the song, as well as the guitar part which has a slight Spanish flamenco feel to it also. “Humanised” which features Bajka on vocals is a soul-jazz track, with jazz-inspired horns and a raunchy vocal, while “Love Alone” featuring Spikey Tee is a fusion of dub, reggae and hip hop, although the results I find on this track are mixed. Thankfully, things get back on track with the brilliant six minute epic title track “Get It Together”. This instrumental has a Curtis Mayfield vibe to it, especially in the horns and percussion and represents an album highpoint with all the ingredients that make up a good fusion track in the form of jazz, funk, electronic and plenty of groove. I also love how out of nowhere the song transitions into a sort of samba for the last minute, showing that the band can also throw up plenty of surprises when you least expect it. “I’ve Tried Way’s” features Serocee and is a hip hop/electronic track which I thought failed to measure up to some of the other tracks, feeling a bit like a come down, especially after the previous epic. This mini-lul in proceedings unfortunately continues on next track “Lady Love”. However, things get back up and running on “All You Need”, which is another six minute track that has an experimental jazz funk vibe to it, while again showcasing the talent on display here when it comes to composition. I find that on listening to this album the instrumentals really stand out and the band do a great job in experimenting with different rhythms, textures, as well as moulding together different sounds, with this track being a prime example. Finally, the album closes with “Bond is Back”, the hint into what this one sounds like is in the title, and album closer “These Words, These Sounds, These Powers” which is probably the most reggae sounding track on the album.

All in all I found this a great album to listen to, and a perfect album to be played outdoors in the sun with a beer in hand and good food. The instrumentals on here really shine through and showcase just what you can do when you mix different styles of music together across one track. The results are quite simply stunning and in some cases quite mind blowing especially for musical nerds like myself. The rhythms of this album really stand out especially in the bass and percussion, rhythms which do a great job in driving the album along from track to track, just like the great experimental funk and R&B records of the early-70s. In conclusion, I may be five years late to the party but the wait was certainly worth, especially when the results are this good. 

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- Sam 

El Michels Affair - Enter the 37th Chamber (2009)

El Michels Affair started life as a house band for a small record label Soul Fire Records, before transitioning into a recording 9-piece musical collaboration led by saxophonist and organist Leon Michels. With this, Michels also started his own record label the Brooklyn-based Truth & Soul Records, a record label dedicated to producing and releasing soul and funk material. El Michel’s Affair play only instrumentals, and their style is a fusion of 60s and 70s soul and funk, Afrobeat and jazz, with some coining this mix of styles cinematic soul, something I completely understand as their music does sound very much like the soundtrack to the movie you have never seen. Their sort of loose, raw playing style is very much Meters-inspired, and perhaps also the Roots, something which I guess keeps with their house band origins and suits very much the sorts of instrumentals they play.

This brings me to the album itself, which aside from containing some amazingly good sounds, is also as a concept quite a clever idea and something which definitely caught my eye. This album Enter the 37^th Chamber is quite a unique album, as it’s a cover album of instrumental versions of Wu Tang Clan and Raekwon tracks, with the band putting their own jazz-funk slant on the backing tracks and beats of some of hip hop’s classic tracks. From my perspective, this is such a cool idea and something I have often contemplated when listening to hip hop. Leaving aside the amazing lyrics which you can get with hip hop, the one thing about this style of music which I have always been sucked into is the quality production, and amazing backing tracks and samples you can find on hip hop recordings, beats that I have often thought would sound amazing just on their own. This makes El Michels Affair’s attempt to recreate such tracks on this album even better, as they are recreating them by playing them live within the confines of a soul-jazz ensemble; and boy do the band do a more than adequate job in covering such classic tracks as Wu Tang’s “CREAM” and “Uzi (Pinky Ring)” and Raekwon’s (who incidentally helped oversee the production and recording of this album) “Criminology”.  

This is such a dope album both concept-wise and musically speaking. It’s music to chill out to, to relax to, to entertain with, and enjoy summer with. I am a big fan of artists who play instrumental music across all styles and these guys with their own unique interpretation of Wu Tang certainly hooked me. I look forward in seeing what else they have up their sleeve, and what they might put their funky, jazzy touch to in the future. DOPE. 

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- Sam 

Dan Auerbach - Keep It Hid (2009)

Keep It Hid is the debut solo album by Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, and is also so far his only non-collaborative solo album. Released in early 2009, the year before Brothers would catapult the Black Keys well in truly into the global music spotlight, Keep It Hid is an interesting album in that it is quite a diverse and varied album musically and is by no means a complete carbon copy of Black Keys material. This album rather than being a full on blues rock album contains a mixture of styles, with Auerbach moving between delta blues, garage rock, blues rock and even. This mixture of styles across the different tracks gives the album a nice balance and allows Auerbach to showcase other sides to his musical pallet, with the results speaking volumes.

Opening track “Trouble Weighs a Ton” is a rootsy pastoral folk tune of which when I first heard it I thought I was listening to a Mumford and Sons album. I certainly wasn’t expecting a Dan Auerbach solo album to start with a soft folk tune, but I was pleasantly surprised that it did. “I Want Some More” has an early-Black Keys feel to it with its swampy rhythm and dirty blues sound, while tracks such as “The Prowl”, “Keep It Hid” and “Street Walkin’” continues this theme with heavily distorted guitars and a blues rock template . “My Last Mistake” is one of Auerbach’s most poppy songs out of all his repertoire including his work with the Black Keys, and his also one of his best. Written in a similar vain to the tracks on Keys album El Camino, this is blues pop at its very best in the form of a driving backing track of guitar, bass and drums, as well as a very catchy melody which bounces along at you as you listen. The heavier blues tracks on this album are separated out nicely by some softer tracks where Auerbach shows off his tender side more so than he ever has done on any Black Keys album for mine. “Real Desire” is a beautiful soulful blues ballad laced with organ and very delicate guitar playing, while “When The Night Comes” is just Auerbach playing acoustic guitar and singing accompanied by a synth backing track. Album closer “Goin Home” probably gets the award for the softest track on the album and would also be in contention for the most beautiful, with Auerbach’s delightful finger picking and heartfelt vocal delivery floating along together in tandem in what is a gorgeous end to the album. What this album shows if anything is that this man can write softer soulful tracks just as good as he writes hard out blues rock epics, whilst singing them as equally as good.

A standard out feature for me on Keep It Hid was the overall production of the record, a task that Auerbach took on himself. Not only is Auerbach a wonderfully talented musician, but he is also a very good producer and it shows on this record where he pays careful attention to the needs of each track in attempting to get the right feel for each individual song, rather than an overall feel for the album. This comes across in the music, of which I noticed when listening is by in large less full on and fierce than the albums of his other band. The blues-oriented songs have a roughness about them and it is on these tracks where Auerbach uses distortion of the guitar and on occasion the vocals, while the folk and soul tracks have a beautiful simplicity to them with minimal production apart from the odd bit of echo. Overall I would give full marks to Auerbach for the production on this record in creating a sound and feel that I would describe as being quite organic in nature and very well suited to the eclectic mix of sound and style on display.

In conclusion then, I would say that Keep It Hid was an excellent debut for the Black Keys front man who showed with this release how he isn’t just a one dimensional blues rocker. Auerbach does a fantastic job in showing off his full range of musical abilities both as a songwriter and a player on multiple instruments on this album, while also giving a glimpse of his softer side as a song-writer, in particular showing how he can write tranquil folk songs as well as down to earth soulful blues. Keep It Hid is well worth a listen if you are into the Black Keys, especially their earlier work, and want to find out what Auerbach sounds like on his own. I thoroughly recommend this album, and I am sure you will be just as pleasantly surprised at the quality of the material as I was.   

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- Sam