★★★★★
Steve Arrington is one of the great underheralded figures in funk, a drummer/vocalist who transitioned from lounge acts to gigs with the Escovedos before joining the Dayton funk band Slave for a five-year stretch of hitmaking. After a successful solo career stretching through most of the 80s, he left the business at the turn of the 90s for the ministry, about the same time as g-funk was starting to mine his catalog for inspiration and a kid from Pasadena named Damon Riddick was traversing over...
- pitchfork.com
2013-08-09
★★★★★
I've been thinking a lot lately about the kind of artists ? not just musicians, but across the board ? who find success almost immediately and explode onto the scene at a young age, versus those who work hard for years and years before anyone has a clue who they are. Adolescent Funk, a new collection of early Dam-Funk home recordings, paints a clear picture of Damon Riddick as one of the latter...
- dustedmagazine.com
2010-11-08
★★★★★
Dâm-Funk's recent work has a lot going for it, but one of the things that tends to get underplayed is its mystery. And for all the revelatory material on Dâm-Funk's watershed 2009 releases, his idiosyncratic take on vintage electro-funk had to come from somewhere. The Toeachizown series came across not just like a breakthrough, but a long-brewing culmination of a deep but largely backgrounded career...
- pitchfork.com
2010-11-04
★★★★★
Stone Throw's fondness for the left of centre offers a synthesizer wet dream from LA. With a dazed, faltering falsetto matched by standard talkbox manipulation, glitterbug Dâm-Funk and his world of computer love has an abundance of soft spots out of neo/robo-soul. Showing his seductions are in for the long haul with two discs, the suspicion of one track-minded sleaze is replaced by tantric, digitally spiritual enlightenment...
- www.clashmusic.com
2010-10-12
★★★★★
Imagine there's nothing funny about the 1980s. Block out your referential nostalgia, your tendency to make punchlines out of Cazals and keytars. Unlearn everything you know about Stock-Aitken-Waterman and gated drums and the synthesizers in "The Final Countdown". Try to think about how the music of the era might've sounded to you if you were experiencing it for the first time, without any knowledge of where or when it was made. Now you're ready to listen to Dâm-Funk...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11
★★★★★
Repetition is a big part of Dâm-Funk's appeal. In a more truncated form, the gelatinously minimal beats of the songs on his outstanding Toeachizown records might be less memorable. But at five-plus minute runtimes, what might appear as a simple drum and keyboard loop slowly ingratiates, until the listener is in the same headspace as Dâm-Funk-- where a sketch of an idea can reveal its depth and impact. Repetition across records, however, can be a tough sell...
- pitchfork.com
2010-08-28
★★★★★
Funk - It's a tricky thing. In the wrong hands it can be some of our least favorite music in the world (think cheesy bass slapping bro's in dorky outfits, you know that scene) but the few who really possess TRUE FUNK can move us like no others. Of course there is the old school pantheon of funk pioneers like Parliament-Funkadelic, The JB's, The Gap Band, The B.T...
- aquariusrecords.org
2009-11-12
★★★★★
A few weeks ago, a few of us in the music-nerd treehouse had some laughs pissing on this thing. Between you and me, I enjoyed that article, because I enjoy shout radio and thug rap, and I'd never considered the parallels. But dude fucked up when he called it all "gangsta."Because, you see, "gangsta" is something specific. Gangsta is where sun-kissed leisure meets violent cynicism. Gangsta is the lackadaisical cruise down Sunset Boulevard that's punctuated by a carjacking...
- dustedmagazine.com
2009-11-05
Loading...
