Youngblood Brass Band Reviewed
Youngblood Brass Band
Is That A Riot?
(Layered)
At first listen, Is That A Riot? comes off as an opportunistic crotching of Rage Against The Machine’s gig. But then you realize Rage were never badass enough to incorporate horns.
White funk, particularly angry White funk, is normally off-limits. That these upstarts chose also to reference a hallowed, Sly Stone album title puts them on even shakier ground. But, if you cut out the momentum-crashing spoken bits, Youngblood Brass Band deliver again and again on their third album. The joke might be this is a New Orleans jazz/hip-hop hybrid from the Wisconsin capital city, but Madison has always been a hotbed of political activity artistic or otherwise (although Milwaukee had the socialist mayors). DH Skogen dances over the rests and sprints of “Nuclear Summer” spitting “Oh inverted world I’m thinking Nobel Prize/because the marriage of pre-remption and commerce/that was mine.” He takes a backseat to the band on the simmering “Waiver” and pseudo-samba of “But You Can’t Run,” but explodes at the end of “Pala Minima,” “Of the people for the people by the people!” While he can’t resist shooting a gilled Bush in a barrell, the robust overtures of the eight-piece band are equally agitated. Cuban jazz screams for its life on “Sell Me More Or Like You Just Don’t Care,” though “Thanks” comes on more like high-school band than the Stax/Volt it perhaps intends to roll. The whole band is never more effective, however, than the mournful passing of a nation in “JEM.”
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— Steve Forstneger
