First Listen: God Made Me Funky's "Welcome to Nu Funktonia," and Bellowhead's "Matachin" |
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| Written by Kenneth Overmars |
| Tuesday, 28 July 2009 00:00 |
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Listening to the newest album by the Toronto-based aggregation God Made Me Funky, Welcome to Nu Funktonia, is like being at a really cool party - even if you're listening to it on headphones at work. The music is a raucous blend of funk, R&B, hip hop, and rock, with playful lyrics sung by both male and female voices, matched with catchy, funny lyrics, and all supported by a rock-solid rhythm. 
Addie Tully - www.addieshouse.com
The band brings extensive experience to its craft, the nine-piece unit having been formed in 1996; and they have clearly found a way to keep their energy evergreen. Though not featured on the album, the band has recently added Melissa O'Neil, the winner of the third season of Canadian Idol, as its female vocalist. Its second album, We Can All Be Free, received a Juno Award nomination in 2008 for Best R&B/Soul Recording of the Year. ChartAttack.com says, "If you can't dance to God Made Me Funky, you can't dance." Arthritic knees have prevented this reviewer from doing much more than a DeVito shuffle since 2003, but the impulse is certainly strengthened by the sounds on this album. -- The British outfit Bellowhead is equally riotous, but in a very different way. While God Made Me Funky thrives on its urban North American mix of James Brown, Michael Jackson and other idols of the modern metropolis, Bellowhead's latest album Matachin (Navigator Records) is full of old folk songs. The sound, when listening to tracks such as "Cholera Camp" and "Whiskey is the Life of Man," is often reminiscent of sitting in one of those low-ceilinged, packed English taverns, in some place like Bristol or Oxford, But these are not just re-hashes of the same old jigs and reels and ballads ground out on a fiddle or guitar - you know, the ones that make the well-fed, middle-aged suburbanites in your local theme pub jump madly up and down or cry into their overly-chilled Guinness on a Friday night. Bellowhead features eleven virtuosos on instruments as diverse as the pipes, the trumpet, the banjo, the tuba, and the accordion; however, the virtuosity is used only to serve the drama of the songs and the performance as a whole. The band has received rave reviews for its live concert and television performances, and is apparently notorious for inadvertently destroying dance floors with the fevered activity it inspires in its audiences.
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elbow to elbow with boisterous students; labourers celebrating their temporary freedom; cheery, buxom prostitutes; down-on-their-luck gentry; and the odd red-nosed, gin-soaked old bar-room intellectual.
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