The Budos Band III

It’s hard to pick highlights, but it’s always a good sign when you listen to an album for the first time and stop to replay the opening track three times.

Predictability is underrated. Just about every band we love eventually undergoes a transformation-- sometimes it excites us, sometimes it pisses us off. And when a band covers the same ground repeatedly on their first few albums, sometimes that's a blessing, especially if what they were doing on their debut was invigorating right out the gate. The Budos Band are one of those groups. Their 2005 debut plied a particularly up-front take on retro funk, one that compacted Afrobeat, Latin soul, and James Brown into brief but highly danceable instrumentals. So did their second album. And so does their third. You could throw The Budos Band III in with the band's previous two LPs-- titled, with a convenient uniformity, The Budos Band and The Budos Band II-- and come up with 32 songs that all sound like they could have been cut in the same session.