Sounding Out the City

2005’s Sounding Out The City was the debut album from bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Leon Michel’s instrumental soul/funk outfit El Michels Affair. Their sound is retro, a blend of late sixties soul, boogaloo and early seventies funk with plenty of soundtrack touches worked in. Album highpoint is perhaps the cinematic “Behind The Blue Curtain,” a smoky soul-jazz groove that goes through a few musical peaks and troughs in its three-and-a-half minutes, from meandering and tense spy-TV-show sections to brassy soul workouts, full of overdriven scuzzy guitar licks and reverb on the sax that sounds as though it was specially imported from 1968. Elsewhere, tracks like “Ocho Rois,” “Slide Show,” “Too Late To Turn Back” and their deft cover of Isaac Hayes’ “Hung Up On My Baby” are all reverential, heavy-duty, thematic soul, adding up to a steamy, intense, close-up soul-jazz and soundscape-funk album.

Even before their Raekwon collabs and Wu-Tang cover albums, you could tell there was something hip-hop-informed in Leon Michels’ compositions: they sound like the natural culmination of obscurity-steeped sample-searching, rhythmic re-engineering, and polygenre source material that took a beathead’s eclecticism in the service of boom-bap into a live-band setting. And that’s not just in the sterling cover of Isaac Hayes’ “Hung Up on My Baby” (of Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” riff origin renown) that closes this debut. The group’s instrumentals have the vibe of a previously unthought-of album that only existed in a beatmaker’s wildest dreams, whether the order of the day is rampaging Pete Rock-ready horns (“Too Late to Turn Back”; “Creation”), greasy Meters-adjacent guitar strut (“Ocho Rios”), or smoke-touched late-night ruminations that would — and, thanks to Ghostface’s “Shakey Dog Starring Lolita,” actually did — fit right into an East Coast true crime rap (“Musings to Myself”).