Following 30 million steams for their previous album, sold-out headline gigs in Manchester and Percolate in London, supporting Chic and Chaka Khan, plus shows for Bluedot, Festival No 6, Love International and Boiler Room in Bali, the Nottingham/Manchester band are more in demand than ever. Fans of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Arthur Russell, Jam Hammer, Prince and Bobby O will find much to like, but this is clearly modern music, where heavy clubs beats are layered-up with perfectly-placed arrangement, ace playing and stratospheric soundscapes. Musically, Crazy P's breadth of studio and writing experience shines brighter than ever, and 'Age Of The Ego' has their unmistakeable stamp of quality, but is now augmented with a broader palate, and - like many - a feeling of upset with the state of the world. More

Next up in Mr Bongo's Groove Merchant Records reissue series, sees an outing for a much-loved and heavily sampled funk/soul/blues album by Junior Parker. Originally issued under the title The Outside Man on Capitol Records in 1970 with an alternative cover, this reissue replicates the Groove Merchant release titled Love Ain't Nothin' But A Business Goin' On featuring the car cover released in 1971.

The Mississippi-born, Memphis-based blues singer, harmonica player and songwriter Junior Parker (aka Little Junior Parker) had a stellar career in music. Since the early 1950s he released records on labels such as Duke, Mercury, United Artists Records and more. Sadly though, Parker died at the young age of 39 during surgery on November 18, 1971.

Originally released under the alternate title a year before his untimely death, Love Ain't Nothin' But a Business Goin' On is drenched in Parker’s trademark buttery vocals and soulful grooves, swaggering between smokey blues, raw funk outings and orchestrated soul ballads (with sublime arrangements by Horace Ott).

The album also features three Beatles cover versions in the form of ‘Taxman’, ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. For 'Taxman', Parker completely reinterprets the song taking into a New Orleans funk realm, a sample of which was used as the main hook line on Cypress Hill's classic 'I Wanna Get High'. Elsewhere, 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is flipped into a tripped-out, psychedelic soul-swamp blues ballad, whilst 'Lady Madonna' is given a funky blues makeover.

As shown with Cypress Hill’s use of ‘Taxman’, since the ‘70s Parker’s legacy has been immortalised for future generations through the deep well of samples that his music has become a source of. Tracks from Love Ain't Nothin' But a Business Goin' On have been sampled by some of the biggest names out there, such as A Tribe Called Quest, DJ Shadow and De La Soul.

A seriously smooth album oozing with soul and emotion from a Blues Hall of Fame inductee, Junior Parker’s Love Ain't Nothin' But A Business Goin' On is a superb example of the early ‘70s crossover funk/soul sound. More

The 3rd part of the Humans Drums & Machines - Trilogy by House Master Ron Trent! The last part of the series seems to be the strongest. Ron's unique sound spectrum in full beauty is shown here on "Dimentions & Beyond".
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- Spec: 2 x LP in paper inners, in 5mm outer sleeve with download card insert.

Tucked away in the great depths of the Warp catalogue is this elegant, liquid heartache of a record. An album credited to the late James Stinson, one half of cult-Detroit techno unit (alongside Gerald Donald) Drexciya, Lifestyles... stands as one of the remarkable records of the genre. Stinson died a year after release, lending this already beautiful work endless resonance.
Where the dystopian aqua-tronics of previous Drexciya were often jet-black, cold, brittle and abrasive this is a yearning soul music, played out down rain soaked streets, the buzzing lights of industry flickering in the darkness, the warm blue of a new day ready to break. This is a record where techno reached its raw, most emotive peak... Sustained pads paint minor-key melodies while electroid-vocals are buried deep in the hydrothermal mass of squelching bass-clusters and funky-filtered bleeps. At its skittering percussion core, a stripped back 808 tapestry, sequenced into myriad jazz-inflected shapes, a pulsing kick drum the snapping heartbeat, ticking hi-hats bursting from every angle.

All this tingles with the ghosts of records past, of Kraftwerkian humanoids, of first-wave Detroit, of refracted Hancock and Ayres, but as Stinson intones on the fifth track, ‘let me be what I wanna be’, Lifestyles is a creation all of its own special making, a sound that would inspire the latter day deep-house machinations of Omar S, Jus-Ed, Moodymann and influence –however indirectly- a wealth of current UK/US bass operators including Actress and Kyle Hall. More importantly it remains a beguiling epitaph to Stinson’s sadly distinguished life. More