Album Notes

Like the deadly scorpion of the album’s cover, The Budos Band’s second release, The Budos Band II, creeps stealthily over the hot desert sand. It is with unmistakable purpose that each beat of the music drives forth, one footstep of many to carry the Scorpion toward its meaning. Persevering out of neither free will nor circumstance, the Scorpion exists completely beyond fear or courage. With his tail arched high in readiness, he maneuvers patiently under the scorching desert sun, and chooses his prey. He strikes without warning and without remorse. The venom of his sting, true to its reason; his victim, his fated spoil.

With its twenty-two legs, three horns, and hallucinogenic venom, The Budos Band, the un-heralded emperors of instrumental Staten Island Afro-Soul, continue to rule. On this their second album, the band takes their listener on a deeper journey into the realms of mind-expanding, Afro-Soul which were first explored on their debut release. Through ten exciting new instrumentals recorded live at Daptone’s House of Soul in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the Budos Band pours themes at once resonant and ethereal over seemingly Herculean rhythms.

The needle falls into Chicago Falcon with a majestic four bar cadence, heralding a well-anticipated drop into what will surely be the most pounding and psychedelic side of wax to rear its head this year. Perhaps their furthest venture into dance club terrain, this opening track draws from the cinematic lines of Bollywood’s action film sound, with the horns’ call hovering purposefully over a hammering backbeat.

Budos Rising takes us deeper. The bass enters alone, slinking into a sparse yet indomitable bottom line for the drums and organ to march eagerly atop. With a razor sharp rhythm guitar hacking in with arresting precision, the way is made clear for the horns to wrap patiently around a noxious, winding theme. Tumbling from a break that feels like a cliff, a lone trumpet falls into a succession of baneful wails that seem to ricochet from the depths of oblivion.

Another commanding horn blast brings us into the menacing farfisa ostinato of Ride or Die, a conquering invasion of a song that breaks fitfully into lagato changes only to return to the dogged villainy of the ostinato again and again. A promising rival to Budos Rising for top “summer jam”.

Mas O Menos is the only song taken from an earlier recording session. Though the timbre of the recording is markedly wide and natural compared with the psychedelic throb of some other outings on this record, the band’s singular sound is unmistakable as they imbue a potent mellifluence into an intoxicating congress of bass and rhythm.

The call and response of percussion instruments with organ and guitar rhythms is a Budos Band hallmark perhaps most evident in Adeniji, in which the orchestrated intercourse sets a hypnotic gridwork of rhythm transcended by a full-toned flute solo cameo by the matchless Daisy Sugarman of both Desco and Daptone renown.

In traditional instrumental style, the Budos Band has saved the second side for their more complex moods. King Cobra enters with a dark penetrating rhythm that preludes a beautiful and somber story told with captivating lyrical sensibility and soul.

His Girl is an example of the power of interpretation, as the musicians bend and twist a Motown melody into the baleful modes of their unique voice. A playful poppish romp transformed into a dark throbbing anthem in their able hands.

Perhaps the Budos Band reached most profoundly into the depths of their penetralia to birth the epic Origin of Man, a churning voyage through prehistory which slinks artfully from a chaotic primordial crawl up to the triumphant orgasmic climax of civilization and its inevitable destruction. As the cycle of entropy begins again, the band reveals the full range of their dynamic mastery.

It may be the raw moxie with which Scorpion’s uptempo, toreadoric pursuit unravels that makes several members of the group claim it as their own favorite track on the album. An evocative unison line traced by bass and guitar is jared loose by the devastating wallop of the horns’ full command.

A fitting conclusion to an album that spans the gamut of instrumental moods like so many desert dunes, Deep in the Sand spins a great winding chronicle from a single sinister thread of baritone saxophone. As the trumpets alternate between reinforcement of and counter point to the principal theme, the plot thickens, only to fall to the baritone’s unaccompanied voice again and again. The horns’ final punctuated proclamation of the album leaves us with an ultimate if chilling resolution to a remarkable journey through the psychedelic universe of The Budos Band.