It's surely a flimsy premise on which to base an album: concoct a genre based on a Paul Weller LP and the collected works of Reef, sketch a lineage of the sound back to the sweaty, funky early '70s, and pop the whole caboodle into a 'Battle Of The Monster Trucks'-style sleeve. But instead of heading for the hills armed to the teeth like a millennial survivalist, gentle reader, you actually ought to pick this one up. For 'Really Heavy Soul' not only works as a concept: it also rocks. Hard.
The notion goes a little something like this: funk, the hi-octane black music created by, principally, Sly Stone and James Brown in the late '60s, had a number of possible routes forward at the dawn of the '70s. While the sound's jazz-trained exponents - not to mention mainstream jazzers in need of an injection of hip - created a fusion of the two musics, some other pioneering souls tried to hitch a rock attitude and dynamic to their funky undercarriage.
At the time the several records that were made this way were so scattered and sporadic that they could no more have constituted a scene than make you a cup of tea. But with hindsight's 20/20 vision and the sure-footed curatorship of respected music journo and funkologist Ian McCann, these disparate recordings can at last be viewed coherently.
The tracks span some eight years, Glass House's little-known 'Crumbs Off The Table' from 1969 being the earliest and the discofied strains of Garnett Mimms' 'What It Is' stretching the time-frame right through to 1977. And while the concept is flexible enough to accommodate both jazz-funk legend Roy Ayers (the tensile 'Virgo Red') and soulman extraordinaire Wilson Pickett ('Don't Knock My Love', which benefits from the understated guitar flourishes of Dennis Coffey), somehow this compilation never quite goes off the rails.
Then again, any record that has room for Curtis Mayfield's glowering, portentious solo debut, the spine-chilling '(If There's A Hell Below) We're All Goin' To Go', can't go too far wrong. Throw in rockin' cuts from James Brown, The Bar-Kays and even the Jackson 5, and it becomes clear that 'Really Heavy Soul' has got it all goin' on.
