soul an FUNK

Long awaited 2nd album. Young soul sensation adopts a more contemporary R&B approach while staying true to his signature style.

Leon Bridges is the 'out of almost nowhere' story that only comes along once in a while. Awareness of Leon Bidges and his unique craft continues to grow authentically and consistently. It was only last summer that Leon was singing open mics in his hometown Fort Worth, TX. One of those open mics was attended by Austin Jenkins and Josh Block of the notable indie band White Denim who were absolutely floored by Leon's voice, songs, and creative vision.

After repeatedly being visited by a strange messenger in his dreams while on tour in the islands of Greece, Toby Pazner became consumed with a vision to tell the stories of The Olympians through music. Chosen by the gods as a messenger for not only his musical gifts, but for his unique position at the center of the Daptone family, Toby built a home studio from scratch and employed some of the top soul musicians in the world to help him breath life into this album. The result is a dramatic and cinematic journey to the outer limits of instrumental soul music, built on a foundation laid by the same craftsmen whose bricks built the legacies of Sharon Jones, Lee Fields, Charles Bradley, The Budos Band, and Menahan Street Band, and painted with lush strings, harpsichord, harp, and horns. The Olympians is destined to be the instrumental gem of the year. Includes download card.

Over the years, different members have traded production and composition duties from album to album. On the new album''Fu Chronicles''Amayo leads us through a thrilling sonic journey of kung fu meets Afrobeat, weaving together the strands of Edo and Yoruba cultural memory from Nigeria with his training and study in Chinese martial arts. Recorded in the Summer of 2018, over seventeen musicians and singers crammed into the storied Daptone House of Soul in Bushwick to record the massive body of work. With live versions and arrangements stretching up to thirty minutes, Perna, Amayo, and Roth worked tirelessly to preserve the hypnotic power of the long-form live arrangements into six concise and powerful album tracks.

Black Pumas has announced their highly anticipated debut album set for release on June 21. The band is led by the creative partnership between Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada and 27-year-old songwriter Eric Burton. Burton is a relative newcomer who arrived in Austin in 2015 after busking his way across the country from Los Angeles, while Quesada has a storied reputation for playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout. 

After the two connected via friends in the Austin scene, they began to collaborate on a new sound that transmutes soul into something idiosyncratically modern. Reminiscent of Ghostface Killah and Motown in equal measure, this original sound ensured that Black Pumas’ weekly residency at C-Boys quickly became “the hottest party in town” (Austin-American Statesman). 

Daptone Records is proud to present The Budos Band III, unleashing The Budos Bandâ TMs brazen sound and inspiring fervor among music lovers throughout the world. Produced by Bosco Mann and TNT at Daptone Recordsâ TM House of Soul Studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the band's third full-length studio effort was conceived during weekly, beer-fueled Staten Island writing sessions as well as more than 150 live gigs over the last two years and recorded during a 48 hour period in January 2010. If the menacing album art, which features a cobra primed for the attack, is any indication of the music itself, we can expect an all out assault of the senses, with a tendency towards the venomous and psychedelic. "The end result," as Pitchforkmedia states, "is something so hip it could kill you in large doses "in the right doses it just plain kills."

As menacing and unhinged as ever, the pride of Staten Island is back with their fifth full-length offering, V. Raw and absent of the modern technological trappings, the Budos pick up where they left off with 2014s Burnt Offering, and finds the group expanding on the brooding, fuzz-fueled riffs, whilst harkening back to the Ethiopian inspired rhythms and percussive proclivity that put Budos Band on the map.

Charles Bradley's forthcoming LP, Black Velvet is an extraordinary collection of 10 tracks making their LP debut. In addition to fan favorites like Charles covers of Nirvanas 'Stay Away', Neil Young's 'Heart Of Gold', and Rodriguez's 'Slip Away' - this album features 4 never-before-heard tracks from Producer Tommy 'TNT' Brenneck's vaults. As a one-time pressing for the super-fan we have a gorgeous black velvet wrapped box set that includes the following: 180g vinyl version of the standard LP, a bonus 12 45rpm EP with stripped down mixes of 4 CB classics, an exclusive slip-mat, 2 printed heavy-duty inner sleeves sporting a surreal painting of Charles and the interview in which he explains the origin of the painting, a 12x12 photo-book with extensive liner notes from Producer Tommy 'TNT', an exact replica of Charles' original Black Velvit business card, and last but certainly not least...a seeded DL Card (once you've retrieved your DL, you can plant the card and wildflowers will grow in memory of Charles).

Charles Bradley's forthcoming LP, Black Velvet is an extraordinary collection of 10 tracks making their LP debut. In addition to fan favorites like Charles covers of Nirvanas 'Stay Away', Neil Young's 'Heart Of Gold', and Rodriguez's 'Slip Away' - this album features 4 never-before-heard tracks from Producer Tommy 'TNT' Brenneck's vaults.

In the fall of 2012, Jones left his small-town in Louisiana for the foothills of Indiana. Alto saxophone in tow he enrolled in the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. “Being a singer was never part of the plan,” Jones admits. But soon enough he found his way in front of a rowdy rock-n-roll band belting out a rambunctious rendition of “Dock Of The Bay,” to a basement full of drunken undergrads. That rowdy band unfolded into The Indications—comprised of Aaron Frazer (drums), Blake Rhein (guitar), Kyle Houpt (bass) and Justin Hubler (organ). Inspired by a handful of dusty and obscure 45s bearing names like The Ethics, Brothers of Soul and The Icemen, The Indications set out to make a record steeped in heavy drums, blown-out vocals, and deep grooves. Gathered around a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and a case of Miller High-Life, the group spent their Sunday evenings re-cording into the early hours of the morning. With comparisons from Charles Bradley and Lee Fields to Al Green, the only thing that separates this band from those greats is their youth. Having now taken their raucous live show all across the US, the band have galvanized a following that are ready to take them to the next level.

Ten years ago, Ikebe Shakedown began pushing the boundaries of instrumental music. Each new track and live set has sent them deeper into combining the primal elements of '70s soul, raw psychedelic style, and cinematic Western soundtracks with powerful grooves and soaring melodies. Now, with their new release, Kings Left Behind (Colemine Records), the band is giving listeners more mystery and majesty than ever before. The album features the entire group collaborating to produce tracks that deliver punches right to the gut, even as dreamy guitars and lush horn melodies and string arrangements capture the imagination. The album was recorded by Ikebe's bassist, Vince Chiarito, at Hive Mind Recording. Opened with Ikebe's saxophonist, Mike Buckley, and another collaborator in 2017, Hive Mind has become a home base for the band, leading to more experimentation with the textures and sounds of a genre they define as Instrumental Soul.

Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016's HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Her new album, Legacy! Legacy! Is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of "Giovanni" to the psychedelic flourishes of "Sonia," the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on "Sonia" and Saba on "Basquiat," or the bloom of Nico Segal's horns on "Baldwin." More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On "Sun Ra," Woods sings "I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start" and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.

Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Nau crafts reflective indie rock tinged with folk and psychedelic influences. He was known for leading the like-minded projects Page France and Cotton Jones in the mid-2000s to early 2010s before beginning to record under his own name in 2016. Nau's newest single on Colemine Records' Karma Chief imprint finds him not only playing the lion's share of the music, but also pushing the psych-folk vibes more in a soul leaning direction. Just as catchy, slightly more upbeat, and timeless as ever. Nau crafts songs that transcend time, but always have a space.

Re-issue, Brown Vinyl, 180 Gram, no cd or digital. OBI (Outer paper Spine Folder), Cardbaord gatefold jacket and printed inner sleeve. Limited to 2000

Before Daptone, there was Desco. Before Desco, there were The Poets of Rhythm. Back in the `90s, a couple of German kids unearthed a raw sound from our own backyard that we hadn't even remembered burying. They drew from the sound of old Funk records, not as a mold, but as inspiration, understanding that sound would always be an origin of their music, but unlike many `Soul revivalists' to follow, they never settled for it as a destination.

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings' final studio album, Soul of a Woman is a lush, orchestral masterpiece. A true testament to the life and career of Daptone's fearless leader and one of the world's greatest performers. In the year prior to her death from pancreatic cancer in 2016, Sharon Jones toured and performed tirelessly, and was also the subject of Miss Sharon Jones!, an acclaimed documentary by Oscar-Winning director Barbara Kopple. Yet somehow, the beloved and heroic soul singer found time to complete a studio album. Soul of a Woman features eleven songs which reveal that the emotion, dynamics, and drama of Jones' voice remained at full power until her final days.
The songs on Soul Of A Woman exemplify two distinct sides of the band s sound. Side One showcases the grittier, bluesier material like Matter Of Time and Sail On giving Sharon the room to flex her vocal prowess, creating a liveness that few studio albums posses. Side Two takes on a more sophisticated orchestral mood. Tracks like When I Saw Your Face and These Tears (No Longer For You), capture a soft vulnerability in Sharon's vocals that draws you deep inside, and yet they remain nuanced with the signature toughness that never allow you to forget she's steering the ship. The finished product is an album that captures a band and a singer at their peak. Includes download card.