Time for some Stark Reality……

Stark Reality: Clouds and Comrades
From: Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop (AJP Records, 1970)

So the fundraising for New Orleans continues over at Soulstrut and they’ve been pulling out the big guns with Stark Reality’s Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Shop appearing earlier this week and raising $1000 for the cause (which was quadrupled by Soulstrut). I’ve posted up a couple of tracks off the album to give you a taster of one of the holy grails of crate digging. While a grand is a pretty big sum of money to spend on any piece of vinyl, if any album’s worth it this has got to be it.

If you want to know more about this stunning album you can read about it on the Stone Throw reissue here. Let me just tell you that it’s been sampled by Large Professor, Pete Rock, Madlib and Cut Chemist and you can’t get a much better guarantee of quality than that.

With the OG raising so much money it seemed only appropriate to post up a track bizarrely missing from the reissue, one of my favorite tracks of the album, Clouds. A truly brilliant mix of folk and funk the track is about as blissful as they come.

The second track, Comrades, is available on the recent reissue and displays the groups ability to hold together their experimental style into tracks that you cannot just admire from afar but also enjoy listening to day in day out. I always love the way the group bring in the vocals, perfectly fitting the lyrics to the outstanding music.. Truly, truly, brilliant stuff.

The regular folks on Soulstrut are starting to run out of money so get on there now and start bidding………