KOOL & THE GANG — Spirit of the Boogie (review)

KOOL & THE GANG — Spirit of the Boogie album cover Album · 1975 · Funk Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Fifth (maybe sixth) album from the Kool Gang, and now we are getting rather close to the sound that brought them to larger attention and therefore to wider chart success. Indeed, we can definitely classify Spirit Of The Boogie as a disco-funk album. Coming with an awesome gatefold graffiti artwork, this is their last really worthy album, IMHO.

Quite a bit of those funk tracks have veered kind of binary rhythmically-speaking, which was a commercial opening to reach out for the crossover dancing crowds who they thought couldn’t handle their more complex patterns of previous. Indeed, the opening title track and the following Ride The Rhythm are clear invitations to the poor-moving types to get down and boogie dance, shake them bootys as if they “had the moves”. Still, there are some extremely gifted killer-funk tracks, like the almost Jazz, where flutes, sax, slapped bass and congas all melt your brains or yet still the ultra bass-heavy Ancestral Ceremony, but they also can’t help but dispelling cheesy soulish-rock ballads like Cosmic Energy

Only three tracks on the flipside, but they’re definitely longer and more involved, and right from the start, the instrumentally-impressive Mother Earth can only please complex music lovers, even if the cheesy chorus-vocals somewhat dampen the impact. The calmer and cooler almost-instrumental Winter Sadness can’t help but plunging into semi cosmic-ey cheesiness, despite some rather pleasant instrumentations. The closing 7-mins+ Caribbean Festival is definitely a Latin-sounding mainly-instrumental showcase, where the group engages one last bravado piece and jams in your eardrums as much sparkles as they can, but maybe they overdo it a tad by overstaying their welcome by two minutes or so and ending in mock-Latin spoken outro.

Certainly another excellent K&tG album, but one clearly announcing their disco era to come, as evidently audible with the first two tracks of the album. The CD reissue comes with a shorter disco-version of the Caribbean Festival closing track, but it’s definitely expandable (not to say useless or even best-avoided). Anyway, SotB is nearing the end of very interesting K&tG string of albums, and from here on, the unstoppable disco slide is also unavoidable, because it was just that time’s trend.
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