Frontier's Edge

The Budos Band

Released on 28/07/2023 by Diamond West Records
Main artists: The Budos Band
Genre: Rock

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For nearly twenty years and through six full-length albums—the last of which was sardonically titled Long in the Tooth—the Budos Band were Daptone Records' most exciting outlier. Like most of their old-school funk/soul-steeped labelmates, they were revivalists, but what they revived was a bit tricky to pinpoint. Their outsider's fascination with pan-African music from Afrobeat to Ethio-jazz was filtered through a love of funk and a subtle but undeniable doom-metal undercurrent that strived to reconcile some genre tropes once considered incompatible. After all this time, it's coalesced into a signature sound that is immediately identifiable—Jared Tankel's bruising baritone sax leading a drama-heightening horn section, the Stax-Sabbath guitar of Tom Brenneck careening with percussive force, the needle-sharp vintage organ riffs that Mike Deller turns into unsettling undertones—and given to reiterating itself while keeping its evolutionary moves subtle and intuitive.

While the group left Daptone to pursue their own label, Diamond West, their first EP in this new phase doesn't sound like a radical escape from the confines of an old constricting house style. What Frontier's Edge does sound like is the work of a strong core of instrumentalists who can leave deep bruises in just two minutes and change—the kind of second-nature funk cuts that took these lifers two days to write, sixteen minutes to listen to, and a lot longer to shake out of your head. The songs all play out like soundtracks for dust-strewn desert clashes that could take place anywhere from Palm Desert to Addis Ababa to some old Italian movie backlot, varying subtly in mode and tone from rousing off-to-battle vibrancy ("Frontier's Edge"; "Crescent Blade") to high-tension dread ("Devil Doesn't Dance"; "Passage to Ashinol") and dynamic vamping in the negative space between the two ("KRITN"; "Curled Steel"). © Nate Patrin/Qobuz

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Frontier's Edge

The Budos Band

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Frontier's Edge