Ground Sound - Pay Attention [Album]

SotoS Music Group, LLC

October 15, 2009, 03:16 PM

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Knock knock.
"Who's there?"
"White Man Funk."
"White Man Funk who?"
"White Man Funk why, don't you mean."

Honestly, funk is hard enough to do well without being middle class stoners with a penchant for the blues. Ground Sound were destined to piss me off right from the get go and sure enough first track 'Funky Junky' actually manages to be more irritating than its title. Impressive.

Ground Sound are a three piece - two brothers who share vocal duties and a drummer - calling New York their home. These guys aren't happy with the state of the world and are having a stab at writing wrongs through the power of blues tinged funk. You can tell I'm sneering, can't you. Sorry but their idea of changing the world is talking about prescription drugs and chastising the 'media' for propagating the body beautiful fixation. I bothered checking out their web-site and stone me if there aren't a bunch of pictures of these guys posing all moody and smouldering, like. You don't think they could be trying to use sex to sell records do you? Because that would be wrong. So very, very wrong.

Good point: They can play. The guitar licks would be so sweet if they were put where they belonged - in front of a blues rock band. As it is, they wander over the top of some bog standard but well executed back lines and it ends up sounding confused.

Confused is the name of the game on Pay Attention. It's the only consistent aspect of the entire record in fact. There is no flow, the songs bump into each other like sheep being herded into a dip, then at about the half way mark just when you've got used to the Lenny Kravitz impersonation they drop the bass out of the mix completely on 'If You Ever' and start sounding like really early Blur. It's helluva disconcerting. Special mention must go to 'The Lake Song' for sounding exactly how a lesser Pink Ladies solo out of Grease 3 might go. Laughable in the worst way.

Ground Sound are out there trying to spread positivity and raise awareness on 'issues' but with Pay Attention all they have managed to do is reconfirm my distaste of white funk and I was pretty solid on that one in the first place.

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