Yeti Season

At this point in the long tenure of El Michels Affair, it’s starting to look like Leon Michels got his most familiar funk-revival impulses out of his system with their ’05 debut Sounding Out the City — after that it’s been a succession of versatile hip-hop collaborations, dub excursions, easy-listening pastiches, and other hybridized down-for-whatever concepts that might be considered diversions if they didn’t feel so committed to the idea every time out. In that sense, maybe Yeti Season is their most surprising detour-turned-thoroughfare. It builds off a presumed one-off Hindi-language single with 79.5 singer Piya Malik (“Unathi” b/w “Zaharila”) that dropped in advance of their Michels-produced 2018 album Predictions, and it immediately became one of their most stylistically intriguing 7”s with its blend of South Asian, Latin, and Turkish psychedelia — clear-eyed and determined in its comfortably funky (and, on the pre-chorus, just a bit prog) vibrancy on the A-side, with the B-side pining for a kind of love that feels both life-affirming and painfully elusive until it drives her to a frenzy. Yeti Season completes that initial impression with a couple later singles — 2020’s Malik-fronted desert-heat twang of “Dhuaan,” backed with “Sha Na Na,” a classic soul/sunshine pop hybrid with The Shacks, and 2021’s sinuous-yet-herky-jerky budget-keyboard groove “Murkit Gem” — with a grip of instrumentals that flesh out the broad-brush pick-and-mix approach to psych-funk “world music” by emphasizing the commonality of hitting on the one. “Ala Vida” could be an exercise in molding Morricone-ian cinema-Southwestern brass into something more meditative, “Lesson Learned” a study in how even the most downtempo folk-rock-laced reverie can benefit from a weighty bassline, “Last Blast” a languid yet deep immersion in some of the shaggier intersections of Nixon-era R&B, jazz, and mellow psych — but they’re all head-nodders played with the kind of ease that inevitably lead musicians to exploratory curiosity, and the kind of session-sharpened chops that make this curiosity sound justifiably assured.