Finally out is X-Ray Ted’s debut long player Moving On which fulfils all the promise of the last couple of years’ worth or so of singles in marrying sixties funky soul grooves to contemporary party breakbeat music. Twelve tracks deep, the album features six of those seven previous singles – or at least the A-sides – which is an excellent thing – while still leaving room for a few surprises.
The opener is most recent single I Been Good i.e. one of those which most effectively realises the aforementioned splicing of sixties soul and contemporary funky breaks in its use of a vintage slab of New Orleans soul for the main sample over which singer Fullee Love supplies a brand new vocal to a lost love. Fullee Love? Yes, you know – Soup of Jurassic 5. Short of famous vocalist friends, Ted is not. Also appearing are Brit-hop stalwarts Dr Syntax and Professor Elemental who supply the bars on the LP’s one proper hip-hop cut – the funked-up Get Loose – and a certain Afrika Baby Bam (yep – of Jungle Brothers) who is also the second emcee to very capably deliver a sung vocal. Bam’s appearance comes on the Covid-era former single Get Out The House when everyone was confined indoors going stir crazy (except dickhead Tory MPs and officials) and is a paean to freedom which, in all its potty-mouthed glory, channels seventies classics from Clarence Reid. Rivalling that for the album’s biggest banger is last single-but-one, Dance With Me, which features the album’s least well-known (though probably not for much longer, on the basis of her work here) vocalist Carys Abigail and also uses a fat slice of southern soul for the main sample. Abigail appears on one of the LPs previously unreleased cuts too – in the form of the pneumatic bongo-tastic Watch Me Walk. Other unreleased treats include a cut even heavier on the bongos – Bap Bap – and the funky uptempo nu-disco pounder Love Inside while the closer is another previous single – Talkin’ in its album version. Moving On is all dancefloor, all banger and if it finds the Bristol-based XRT working within the same funk-hip-hop-breakbeat nexus as the similarly-Bristol-based like-minds The Allergies, it also shows our man’s had plenty of room to carve out his own niche.
(Out 5 July on Bomb Strikes)