The Budos Band – Frontier’s Edge (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

The Budos Band – Frontier’s Edge (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 15:37 minutes | 287 MB | Genre: Funk, Afrobeat, Psychedelic Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Diamond West Records

Frontier’s Edge is the new EP by the fiery, energetic and genre-defying group The Budos Band. After a two-decade run with the legendary Daptone Records, Frontier’s Edge is the first new music from the group on the new label, Diamond West Records – run by The Budos’ saxophonist Jared Tankel and guitarist Tom Brenneck. The Budos Band’s departure from Daptone was on good terms; the split from their long-time home base was an organic result of the band’s evolution. “It’s just a natural growth,” Brenneck says, admitting: “We’re going further away from the sound of Daptone and into territory they probably wanted to stay away from.” As a result, Frontier’s Edge finds the group hungry, passionate and primed to charge into their next epoch newfound sense autonomy within the collective. “We’re a powerhouse in the studio; we can produce ourselves,” Brenneck says proudly of a long process of self-containment. “I take the helm, but the band, they know what they want.” As expected from The Budos Band, Frontier’s Edge resists analysis; it represents the band as they are: a contained explosion. You don’t pick apart Frontier’s Edge; you feel it all at once. “Somehow, we wrote six songs in two days,” says The Budos’ drummer, Brian Profilio. “Tom was able to take what we were doing and put it together in a cohesive manner.” Whether this is your first rodeo with The Budos Band or you’ve been following them throughout their two-decade run, Frontier’s Edge contains their musical universe – Afrobeat, Ethiopian music, proto-metal, any number of other streams – in microcosm.

For nearly twenty years and through six full-length albums—the last of which was sardonically titled Long in the Tooth—the Budos Band were Daptone Records’ most exciting outlier. Like most of their old-school funk/soul-steeped labelmates, they were revivalists, but what they revived was a bit tricky to pinpoint. Their outsider’s fascination with pan-African music from Afrobeat to Ethio-jazz was filtered through a love of funk and a subtle but undeniable doom-metal undercurrent that strived to reconcile some genre tropes once considered incompatible. After all this time, it’s coalesced into a signature sound that is immediately identifiable—Jared Tankel’s bruising baritone sax leading a drama-heightening horn section, the Stax-Sabbath guitar of Tom Brenneck careening with percussive force, the needle-sharp vintage organ riffs that Mike Deller turns into unsettling undertones—and given to reiterating itself while keeping its evolutionary moves subtle and intuitive.

While the group left Daptone to pursue their own label, Diamond West, their first EP in this new phase doesn’t sound like a radical escape from the confines of an old constricting house style. What Frontier’s Edge does sound like is the work of a strong core of instrumentalists who can leave deep bruises in just two minutes and change—the kind of second-nature funk cuts that took these lifers two days to write, sixteen minutes to listen to, and a lot longer to shake out of your head. The songs all play out like soundtracks for dust-strewn desert clashes that could take place anywhere from Palm Desert to Addis Ababa to some old Italian movie backlot, varying subtly in mode and tone from rousing off-to-battle vibrancy (“Frontier’s Edge”; “Crescent Blade”) to high-tension dread (“Devil Doesn’t Dance”; “Passage to Ashinol”) and dynamic vamping in the negative space between the two (“KRITN”; “Curled Steel”). – Nate Patrin

Tracklist:
1-01. The Budos Band – Frontier’s Edge (02:35)
1-02. The Budos Band – Devil Doesn’t Dance (02:46)
1-03. The Budos Band – KRITN (02:31)
1-04. The Budos Band – Crescent Blade (02:55)
1-05. The Budos Band – Passage To Ashinol (02:16)
1-06. The Budos Band – Curled Steel (02:30)

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