darkshade
Soulive go hip-hop.
But don't be afraid if you're not into that. First off, if you're familiar with their last couple of albums, you should have seen this coming. The band were hinting at this direction, even had a couple of rappers on the previous album "Next". On "Turn It Out Remixed", they let it all loose, with hip-hop guests on most tracks, except for 4 not counting the intro track.
But the band is still playing all the music. It's like The Roots, they're an actual live band, but they're a hip-hop band. Here, Soulive take their older material, and rework it for the hip-hop treatment. And these guys got some nice rappers for this album, a lot of them jazz-rap artists themselves; such as Chali 2na from Jurassic 5; who play a style of jazz-rap like The Roots, does some nice stuff in the context of Soulive.
It's interesting to hear Soulive's music in this way. It makes you realize that their music was always able to transfer well to the sound of hip-hop. They definitely add a little something to make the beats a little more 'edgy' but some of their beats in the past were always edgy, here there is a little studio manipulation in the drum sound, for example. Since the band is playing on the whole album, there is still a little room for them to stretch out, like on Cash's Dream Remix, and many of the tracks are still in that Hammond organ trio sound. It's funny because the band, at times, play like their own music is being sampled, but they're actually playing in ostinato style; you just have to really pay attention to the small nuances.
If you like a little hip-hop in your soul-jazz, this should be right up your alley. I recommend anyone into jazz-rap to give this one a shot. It's pretty good, and I'm not the biggest hip-hop fan. Because it's Soulive actually playing the music, it makes it even better.