Category: The Budos Band

The Budos Band builds a fire with the dry tinder of percussion, cracking and popping on hand and kit drums. It catches in a vaporous pool of keyboards, fuzzy guitar leads and insistent bass, and then jets out in sudden sparks of brass, the heat concentrated in sharp, incendiary bursts. This seventh album from the Brooklyn-born funk/soul/Afrobeat/Ethio-jazz collective rocks a bit harder than some Budos Band offerings but doesn’t mess with the formula. These songs slouch and swagger, grooving from the hip in loose, louche sensuality, but they’re also super on point, the brass coming in like a knife’s edge, the rhythms in ideal, nearly mechanical sync. 

The Budos Band swaggers into the fray in Frontier’s Edge with a brilliant squall of brass and a sinuous rhythm section, splitting the difference between classic 1970s blaxploitation and a serpentine ethio-jazz groove. The Brooklyn-born large ensemble—which includes a full horn line and multiple percussionists in addition to the standard rock instruments—made six albums and two EPs on soul-funk revivalist Daptone Records. Now, they’re continuing the saga on their own Diamond West label.