The Vinyl Room

With OutKast’s Aquemini, Goodie Mob’s Still Standing, and Witchdoctor’s …A S.W.A.T Healin’ Ritual under their belts, you could safely say that Organized Noize had a strong ’98 without even needing to factor in this largely-overlooked showcase for producer-singer Sleepy Brown and his production unit. But The Vinyl Room is fascinating in itself: if one of Organized Noize’s biggest strengths lie in their ability to reconcile ’70s soul-auteur classicism with ’90s Southern hip-hop gloss, this is where they get to indulge that impulse to the fullest. The tempo of this jam-sesh-vibe set of laidwayback funk never even flirts with triple-digit BPMs, and the atmosphere is comfortably stoned with a side of vague ambient horniness, but it’s all played and arranged and produced so meticulously that you can also geek out from pure audiophilia. Sure, the peak-funk ’70s signifiers are slathered on as broad as a leisure suit’s lapels — brace yourself for an undiluted dose of headswimming wah-wah guitars, Mayfield falsettos that expand on the universe glimpsed in Sleepy’s “Player’s Ball” hook, glimmering laconic Fender Rhodes chords, and rumbly warm-bath basslines that occasionally congeal into burbling Bootsy-oid space-goop. But The Vinyl Room doesn’t come across as either a snickering Afro-wig irony cosplay or a meticulously over-reverent replica of an idealized past. For a group that’s never relied prominently on straight-up sampling, they still personify hip-hop’s strengths in giving formative sounds of a previous era a context less dependent on (or trapped in) a time-limited lifespan.