If you're a bunch of stringy Yanks, it doesn't matter that your music sounds like the only records you've ever heard were made by drainpipe-trousered New Yorkers in 1969. Similarly, if you're in your early 20s and from Wigan, you're the greatest band in the land if your records appear to owe their entire reason for existing to the work of a doomed singer-songwriter and his revered father.
If you're a bloke with a mansion in Buckinghamshire, a fleet of sports cars and a celebrity ex-girlfriend, though, making music that is open about its influences is enough to have you carted off by the taste police. Pop music - it's a fickle game.
Jay Kay and his band take as their starting point music made mainly in America between 1975 and 1978, just as funk was fading and disco became dominant. Bass keyboard lines snort like rutting elephants beneath these tracks, recalling the great P-Funk line-ups dominated by Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell. 'Feel So Good' hints at Heatwave's 'Boogie Nights', while first single 'Little L' doffs its doubtless outsize headgear in the direction of the great BT Express, as Philly-styled strings swoosh and squirm around guitarist Rob Harris's taut, wiry riffs.
Kay doesn't do "sensitive" quite as well as he would like, which means the Latin-ate 'Corner Of The Earth' and the evidently heartfelt closer, 'Picture Of My Life', are uncomfortable attempts to tackle a more conventional singer-songwriter template. He's on a surer footing with 'Black Crow', returning to the eco-warrior subject matter of his earlier records, and seems more at home with campaigning and protesting than he does with soul-baring.
Not quite as effortlessly enormous as 1999's blistering 'Synkronised', 'A Funk Odyssey' nevertheless won't disappoint anyone taken with the band's direction on that record. Whether it'll win over the pseuds who equate studied nonchalance and calculated "attitude" with all that's grand about pop is another matter entirely.
