REVIEW: NEW WORLD GENERATION – NEW WORLD GENERATION

New World Generation
New World Generation
Now Again Records

Somewhere between the early and late seventies there was a sesmic shift in the soul music of America. At the beginning of the decade the emphasis was on the earnest and epic sprawl of albums such as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, or the rasping sexual provocations of James Brown; it was music with dirt under its nails, a political edge and a street-wise strut. Within ten years the genre had shifted towards something more hedonistic and ephemeral, mutating into disco in the process. As Now-Again founder Eothen ‘Egon’ Alapatt points out in his sleeve notes, many of the bands that had earned their chops in the sweat lodge of the first part of the decade struggled to make the transition.

One exception was New World Generation, a big band soul outfit headed by Lekan Parsons. This reissue collects together their entire recorded output, itself an impressive feat given the band’s relative obscurity. It is worth pausing at this point to note that this is what Now-Again do best, and deserve particular praise for. Their reissues are not only lovingly collated, but also function as important documents of music that rarely found commercial success outside their own sphere. New World Generation’s offering is no exception: a hyperactive and melodic set of late soul music that simultaneously seems luminous and curiously elegiac, marking as it does a transition in music that – whilst not inherently bad – seems fairly tedious now all the cocaine discos have stopped.

‘Curious Soul’ is perhaps the clearest indication of what New World Generation succeed at, its bass and percussion tightly locked and rooted in early disco, with skittish guitar and keyboard serving to energise the song with . The vocals are immaculate in their harmonising, whilst lyrically the whole album leans towards affirmative calls for unity. There seems, in fact, a heavy emphasis on some form of collectivisation, particularly with regards to the sharing of the vocal duties. ‘I’m Feeling Fine’ features a superb female vocalist whose phrasing is faintly reminiscent of Erykah Badu’s early work. Elsewhere the proto-rap of ‘Do What You Do’ is nested comfortably in a musical bedding that at times recalls Dr Dre’s G-Funk work.

New World Generation are a terrific discovery, and well deserving of a Now-Again re-issue. While there isn’t a great deal of variation track-to-track, the whole album seems a fitting document of a band that managed to produce dazzling music in spite of the world’s disregard. The transition of fashions for some may have been painful, for New World Generation it seems to have been something of a revelation.

Words: Andrew Spragg

Filed under: Reviews by J.G.