Back catalogue: Funk Soul & Jazz

Review: In October 2024 Lady Blackbird, producer and guitarist Chris Seefried, Foundation Music label head and A&R Ross Allen and Blackbird's travelling band of Kenneth Crouch (keys), Tamar Barzilay (drums) and Johnny Flaughers (bass) took a break from extensively touring her prior album, Black Acid Soul, to lay down several tracks in Los Angeles. Decamping for a week-long recording session in the legendary recording studio complex East West, the fable goes that an uninterrupted spate of session magic ensued, out from which five acid jazz and soul bursters sprang forth. A curt selection of just five tracks, of which there were many more recorded during the LA session, the likes of 'Purify', 'It Must Be Love' and 'When The Game Is Played On You' span the whole gamut of modern soul, from the bright to the bare-bones but beguiling.

Review: Slang Spirituals is soul singer and producer Lady Blackbird's latest full-length album, following up the EP of the same name released earlier in 2024. A collaborative wall of sound, scaled in collaboration with producer and guitarist Chris Seefried - as well as her very own, devoted session musical retinue, consisting of Kenneth Crouch (Keys), Tamar Barzilay (drums) and Johnny Flaughers (bass) - this bright, yet equally, extimately melancholic record is a twin paean to two superficially opposed themes: soul-purgation and soul-complication. 'Let Not' and 'Purify' make up the former front face, heliolatrically facing up to the brighter sides of life with yellowed guitar fuzzes and boundless vocals, while B-siders 'Whatever His Name' and 'When The Game Is Played On You' prefer to explore the darker side of the moon, deploying various mellotrons, pump organs and cross-sticks to acoustically muse on the inverse pains that are betrayal, longing, and graft.