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Good new CD by Dayton singer Van Hunt.
Hey, kids, here’s your preview of the CDs we’re reviewing in this Friday’s GO! magazine (in the print edition … try it! You’ll like it).
R&B
Van Hunt
“On the Jungle Floor”
The second disc from Dayton-born Atlanta expat Van Hunt bubbles and boils with a raw, exciting mixture of funky soul and stripped-back R&B that stands out from the current pack with a rough-edged sound that one might sooner expect to find on a rock album.
Except that a rock album is also one of the many things that this kaliedoscopic package turns out to be. Hunt nimbly shifts gears from genre to genre, equally at ease in any form — skipping from pretty piano crooning on “Daredevil, Baby” to surging-guitar sneering on the terrific “Ride, Ride, Ride.”
“Get on up and dance!â€? he hollers, and he’ll do almost anything to get you doing it — such as sliding next into the slow, velvety seduction of “Being A Girl” on the very next cut. You never know what’s coming next.
Hunt credits his musical polymorphism to growing up here in the Dayton area (visit his bio at www.vanhunt.com), cutting his musical teeth on the exuberant richness of the city’s 1970s explosion of funk bands that was led by the Ohio Players. Settling in the south after college, he plunged into making music. His 2004 debut disc ended up with a Grammy nomination and the same solid reviews that he’s earning for On the Jungle Floor.
And what’s not to like about a guy who not only enthusiastically acknowledges and appreciates his many influences, but also handles and updates them with such finesse? He’s working early Prince here, channeling late-career Smokey Robinson there, out-Kravitzing Lenny K someplace else. Heck, “At the End of a Slow Dance” even sounds like a U2 song, if you squint a little bit.
Hunt plays every instrument as he goes and calls the shots smartly enough that he’ll even toss in an old Stooges cover, “No Sense of Crime,” that he turns from punk into a pretty, rain-patter soul groove. It would be weird, if he didn’t manage it so well.
We like this one. Grade: A-
iPod picks: “Hot Stage Lights”; “Ride, Ride, Ride”; “If I Take You Home (Upon…)”.
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