CHARLTON LANE-MENDIP SOUL STEW VOL1(CD)

The section on the musical Venn Diagram where funk, krautrock, soul and 60’s garage rock all meet is, to be fair, an extremely tight space to fit a band into. But if you do manage to find this rare and elusive space, put it under the microscope and look very closely, you will see the face of Charlton Lane smiling back at you from within that sonic enclave.

The art of being musically adventurous isn’t always about trying to gene-splice sounds or blend styles into whole new genres, the smart music-maker realises that the hard work has already been done and that the answer lies in taking the sounds of the past and making them work in harmony in new and interesting ways. Maybe we can call that forward-thinking nostalgia. Maybe not.

Whatever it is, it is what Charlton Lane revels in and the sounds here may be familiar but the overall result is certainly fresh and strangely invigorating, it takes in existing comfort zones but also teases those sonic safety nets out to their (il)logical conclusions.

BIG TAKEOVER MAGAZINE(NYC)