Get Funky With Me - The Best Of The TK Years

Chronique

This compilation covers the hitmaking years of Peter Brown, a musician who had some notable dance music hits in the late '70s and early '80s on the Miami-based TK Records label. This label is best known as the home of funky disco acts like K.C. & the Sunshine Band and Jimmy "Bo" Horne, but Brown's work took a different tack. The songs on Get Funky With Me: The Best of the TK Years pursue slick, carefully crafted sound that has more to do with studio-driven dance acts like Chic. Like Prince, Brown recorded the majority of his instrumentation on his own in a home studio and added frills like orchestration and backup vocals later. The result is a sound that feels lush yet has a hand-crafted touch: "Dance With Me" is a bouncy disco outing that blends sprightly strings with an insistent bass-driven groove, and "Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me" is a reggae-tinged slice of dance funk that features Brown trading vocals with a brassy female chorus over a sumptuous production full jazzy horns and percolating synthesizers. There is also the occasional ballad; the standout is "Without Love," which layers hymn-like vocals over a track that marries subtle strings to dreamy synthesizer hooks. Get Funky With Me: The Best of the TK Years also throws in a pair of modern remixes, both of which lack the handcrafted charms of the original tunes. Overall, the songs presented here are lightweight (especially in the lyrical department) but this is forgivable because they were obviously intended as fun, lighthearted dance music. More importantly, his music triumphs over such shortcomings because he has an undeniable knack for crafting hooks and layering them in a hypnotic fashion: for instance, "Can't Be Love - Do It to Me Anyway" weaves minimalist keyboard riffs and chant-like vocal hooks into an entrancing synth pop epic. All in all, Get Funky With Me: The Best of the TK Years is a solid disco collection that is well worth a spin for anyone who has enjoyed Brown's hits.

© Donald A. Guarisco /TiVo