AMM Gold: African Music Machine Posted by Junior

African Music Machine: Black Water Gold and A Girl In France From: Black Water Gold [Villery, 1973] I was actually planning on taking a small breather from The Funk related posts for a while as, to be brutally honest, no matter how much love you have for a genre, there's only so many ways you can write about how the raw drums hit, the snaking bass flows, and the horns rise to crescendos before you start considering trawling your thesauruses. However, like Michael Corleone says, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" and I can't resist bringing out all the cliches once again when I listen to an album like African Music Machine's Black Water Gold. An eight piece funk band from New Orleans, the group were created by the prolific session bassist Louis Villery, releasing a chain of great funk releases that sold very little and became a staple of any collector's want list. Jump forward to the modern day and Fuel 2000 release a remastered version of the album to acclaim and appreciation. But, for once, the story doesn't end there as Louis is still touring and releasing new material, details of which are on the MySpace page. As for the tracks themselves? Both the gems featured here tick all the criteria mentioned at the beginning of the post and they're both fantastic workout grooves. The songs give an obvious tip of the hat to the music of James Brown and they actually have a song dedicated to him on the album - it's funny that I can't actually think of too many artists who call out their musical heroes in the lyrics in this fashion. Spot on remastering job as well. I just noticed that our blog buddy Home Of The Groove featured a track from this album back in 2005 and had some revealing feedback in the comments which is worth checking out. It's more than a little cheering to see the love and hard work poured into this finally getting some decent recognition and good luck to them with their future releases.