For anyone who thought Da Funk was beholden to The One, the Italians have a little message. Not content with spending the mid-to-late 70s churning out now-ridiculously obscure prog-jazz-fusion LPs, whatever the hell they put in their bolognaise led them to stretch funk’s rubber bass to breaking point.
Collated by “the Italian John Peel”, RC’s Ernesto de Pascale, L’anthologia gives us four decades’ worth of the stuff. The 00s young bloods, however, seem to have ingested a diet of arse-end baggy and turgid, late-period Prince, making most of the second disc, Jungle Boogie-referencing moments aside, a staid listen in comparison to the first. The old guard are at their best when they seem to think that funk is more about screaming maniacally, making animal noises and generally taking a wilder approach to Clinton’s P-Funk (if you can imagine such a thing). Andrea Mingardi provides some sort of freeform scat on top of Xa Vut Dalla Vetta, seemingly singling out macaroni as funky pasta, the band shifting gears until he sounds positively demented. The funk mentalist award must, however, go to Area, whose opening La Mela Di Odessa (1920) is a jazz-funk-prog-rock odyssey for any festival audience. With a swathe of Area reissues also out (see our review in RC 374), we can only hope that Cramps have more of this in their joints.
