Review from www.nodepression.com .

Junior Kimbrough died four years ago at the age of 67. His was not a death by misadventure, but from heart failure after a life of hard work in a region of the country where the median income dips precipitously low and the work days run back-breakingly long. His juke joint in Holly Springs, Mississippi, known simply as Junior’s Place, served as the de facto headquarters for a motley assortment rural bluesmen (R.L. Burnside, Asie Payton, T Model Ford, etc.) who all wound up recording for the Fat Possum label in the 1990s. Within a couple years of Kimbrough’s death, Junior’s Place followed suit, burning to the ground.

Though music coursed through the full of his life, he had recorded only five songs prior to the sessions for his first album, All Night Long, in 1992. This set commences with the rare 1969 single “Release Me”, on which Kimbrough is joined by Charlie Feathers. Jumping ahead nearly 25 years, there’s a seamless consistency to Kimbrough’s approach in every regard. His songs are all slowly undulating grooves — not the urban boogie of John Lee Hooker, rather the unfolding rhythmic swirls of Africa and the Mississippi Delta.

Electric, but less overtly amped-up than the music of his longtime friend and rival R.L. Burnside, Kimbrough’s music oozed danger and sex. It’s all deep wants and teeth-clenched insistency. Included here, from his last session, is 1996’s “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out”. The title, adhered to a six-minute instrumental, is what makes this music so relentlessly powerful. As his singing danced between whispers and wails, it shut out every other outside force in his world. It’s as if the most sustaining breaths in Junior Kimbrough’s life were all recorded during the takes of these dozen songs.

The Budos Band is an instrumental band recording on the Daptone Records label. The band has nine members (with occasional guests) who on their first studio albums, played instrumental music that was self-described as “Afro-Soul,” a term and sound which – in a 2007 interview – baritone saxophone player Jared Tankel elucidated as being drawn from Ethiopian music the band had been listening to that had a soul undercurrent to it, which the band then “sprinkled a little bit of sweet 60’s stuff on top” of. Since this time, the band has moved toward playing what they refer to as “70’s Psychedelic Instrumental Music.”

Jazz, deep funk, Afro-beat, soul and heavy-metal influences can be heard in the Budos Band recordings, all of which were released on Daptone Records and recorded at the label’s own studio, Daptone’s House of Soul, in Brooklyn, New York. Though they reside in Brooklyn The Budos Band have toured most of North America, Several countries in Europe and parts of Australia.