Dinner Music #195: The weekly lineup

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This week we’re listening to soul, deep house, psych-rock, folk, and all of the genres that stretch and merge between these.

We begin with a blend of deep house, soul and disco with the album In The Red from UK-native Trus’me, which takes “on the sound system roots of reggae, soul, and disco, blending them with house and techno, to create a hypnotically radical sound.”1 If you like deep sounds, boogie and dancing, this is a really good one. The occasional funk and jazz instrumentation and left-field sampling sets this album apart from club-forward house music and gives the sound a grit and edge that brings out a groovy vibe in every track. It’s the kind of album you hope is playing at a very cool restaurant with good food! We move into neo-soul with relative newcomer Jalen Ngonda’s Come Around and Love Me. His voice so disarming you can’t help but just listen. This record was Ngonda’s debut (he released a new album earlier this summer) and brims with retro good-feels, which can easily sound derivative or twee, but here the sound manages to sound additive to soul, rather than just another thing that sounds like everything else. The tracks dip in and out of ballad-esque soul tracks, through boogie and afro-funk and beyond. We take it back to the sixties with Incense and Peppermints from Strawberry Alarm Clock, a psych-rock band out of California with a “Summer of Love” sound, who toured with The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield. Over the years, the group went through an extreme amount of lineup changes:

And for a while early on in their touring, the band would get brought out onto stage on “magic carpets” by roadies. Kooky bunch! Next, we have More Sweet Soul from Arthur Conley. Conley moved to Europe early in his career, first to the UK then Belgium, before settling in the Netherlands and changing his name to Lee Roberts. He wasn’t huge in the US, but you’d recognize this song:

A couple of years ago, NPR’s Fresh Air ran a segment on Conley with the rock historian Ed Ward and Ward explained the move to Europe and name change:

Nobody knew Lee Roberts, and at last Conley was able to live in peace with a secret he'd hidden - or thought he had - for his entire career - he was gay. But nobody in Holland cared. He missed performing, so he got a Dutch band together and cut some records. In England, soul record collectors heard them and thought Lee Roberts sounded an awful lot like Arthur Conley. He did a brief interview with a couple of them in 1999 and admitted the truth, then went silent. He moved to a tiny village near the German border, toured a little and died at home in 2008.

We end with Dick Stusso’s Nashville Dreams / Sings the Blues. A story-driven album written by Nic Russo from the perspective of the made-up character Dick Stusso, a guy who is a bit more unhinged and a mess than the musician behind the project.

Enjoy.