The Pazant Brothers & The Beaufort Express - Loose And Juicy (1975/2016)

The Pazant Brothers had been recording since the late '60s by the time they finally got to issue their only album (under the name the Pazant Brothers & the Beaufort Express) in the mid-'70s. (In fact, many of the tracks are reworkings of songs they'd cut on earlier singles, some of whose original incarnations dated all the way back to 1969.) The opportunity to do a full-length LP probably came too late for the group to make the most out of it, particularly as the instrumental R&B scene was moving on from the gritty funk they played onto disc. It's not a bad slice of reasonably earthy funk, the emphasis on the instrumentation; what vocals there are tend to be ornamental party chants rather than song-driven. Rhythmically, the group is a bit like a link between the Latin-influenced boogaloo soul of the last half of the 1960s and the later sounds of Kool & the Gang, a feature that's particularly striking on the title cut. There's also a hint of New Orleans in the way they like to elongate their horn lines. While they get into some fairly hard grooves on tracks like "Toe Jam," overall the album's a little workmanlike, though it has its fervent admirers among funk collectors. The whole album is included on the Pazant Brothers CD compilation The Brothers Funk.