(originally posted on Facebook)
We want the funk! Give up the funk! In all seriousness funk music is awesome- at least real funk music from the 70s. You know, the stuff that established what funk was supposed to sound like before white people starting copying it and called it disco. Mothership Connection has that awesome classic funk sound that is perfectly mixed and drips with cool. You just don't hear music that sounds like this anymore. Funk music is perfect dance music, but if any of these songs were to be played at a club or a wedding reception odds are the asshole DJ is gonna play a remix that is mixed for loudness sake or a hip-hop song that "samples" the key riff. Fuck that shit, I want The Funk!
Anyway, I really liked the grooves on this album but it didn't really work as well as I wanted. Most of the songs didn't have complex lyrics or much beyond an over-repeating chorus. I've complained about choruses before, but what was really lacking on Mothership Connection was melody. The most important purpose of lyrics in a song is to build a melody on top of the instruments. Not every song needs to have lyrics, but if you're going to do an instrumental then one of the instruments needs to do more than pound out a progression or riff.
The band on Mothership Connection never even did a solo or a drum break, and the simple lyrics left very little beyond the chord progression. Imagine if Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" didn't have vocals and was just that piano riff for ten minutes. That's the problem with most of the songs on Mothership Connection. Excellent riffs, good progressions, but no melody and the songs were a bit too long. I liked it, and want at least one song for my collection. 3 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment