Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

You can’t have too many funk CDs. I’m telling you. You can have everything in the James Brown discography, all of the Parliament/ Funkadelic/ P-Funk/ Bootsie Collins manifestations, The Meters catalogue, official and unofficial, and it’s not enough. It’s like a drug. And here is your latest fix, The Killion Floor by Orgone.

Orgone has been around for a while, coming together around 2001, backing heavyweights like The Pharcyde on tour and the legendary Eddie Bo on a couple of concert appearances, also playing on their own. They do just fine on their own, thank you; The Killion Floor, as far as I can determine, is their second long-play, and it’s killer stuff, just what you wanted to hear even if you didn’t know it. The tracks on The Killion Floor are roughly split between instrumentals and vocals featuring Fanny Franklin (and Noelle Skaggs on one track); the ladies do just fine, but my favorites on here are the instrumentals, particularly Sophisticated Honky, a track a keep getting stuck on with a deep dark bass line, great guitar riff, and an unobtrusive horn chorus in the background. There’s also A Wot, a hyper kinetic party track with a fabulous percussive underpinning, Justice League, a fat slice of funk which slows the tempo down just a bit, and…well, every track is great. You’ll have a favorite, and it’ll keep changing, but hopefully by the time you have played every single track on The Killion Floor over and over and over Orgone will have a new project out.

This is grown folks music, soul music the way I remember it, the way Esther Phillips and Booker T did it and how The Meters, when they can stand to get together, still do it. Fabulous musicians, great tracks, and production that doesn’t try too hard. Damn near perfect all the way around. What more could you ask for? And I’m willing to bet it will still sound just as great twenty years from now. If you’ve always wondered how the job gets properly done, look no further.