COME NOW AGAIN

Natural Yogurt Band: Chit Chat
From Away With Melancholy, (Now Again, 2009)

About eight years ago, if you saw a release for Stones Throw sister label Now Again, you could put your last dollar up in a bet that it was a soul or funk compilation. In the last two years, though, they have been delightfully mixing it up with a smorgasbord of musical treats.

On the North American 1,000-piece limited edition (in both vinyl and CD) repress of the Natural Yogurt Band's variety of part jazz, part funk, part psychedelic, and even part Gregorian chant, the sounds of a “genre” known as library music breathes with the drone of chants and a dose of breakbeat drums serving notice that it's a head nodder in “Chit Chat.” It will have you checking the card catalog for the band's other releases.

Top Drawer: Song Of A Sinner
From Forge Your Own Chains: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads And Dirges 1968-1974, (Now Again, 2009)

Continuing along the psychedelic front is Top Drawer's “Song Of A Sinner” that in its intro, and vocally even through the tracks' end, sounds very folkish. But then two minutes in, a guitar solo cuts in and through your soul and nearly bleeds you dry during its (three minute!) epic presence. It's not quite Eddie Hazel in “Maggot Brain” or Hendrix in “Voodoo Chile,” but it's not far off and is a total a face melter. It's torturous and wrenching throughout, and you feel as though YOU should go to confessional after hearing it. “Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned,” would be an appropriate watermark in the song.