A sweet little record that definitely offers up what it promises in the title – a lower-fi version of the Japanese city pop sound from years back, yet one that's also nicely inflected with some of the hip hop elements that Grey October Sounds use in their music! The image on the cover is nicely fitting, as there's a intimacy here that's nice – kind of a peace within the urban setting, not far from the beats and the streets – but a bit more private too, and done here with contributions from Esu, Lo Film Creation, Monbee, and Adon. Titles are all in Japanese, and if you've dug previous work by the group, you'll find plenty here to love! (Japanese, New Grooves) LP, Vinyl record album

We've loved the music of Benny Sings for years – and can't understand why the man's not a much bigger success at a worldwide level – because his songs have the gentle soul and careful construction of the sorts of music that used to grace the airwaves decades back! Yet maybe the obscurity is always what makes Benny so great – as the songs here feel like lost AOR gems from a time when folks really knew how to make a record – but also sifted down to a core approach that never lets things get too overly-polished or commercial – kind of that modern love of classic modes that we also find in the music of Ed Motta, even though Ed's a very different singer overall. Titles include "Familiar", "Not Enough", "Duplicate", "Dreamin", "Summerlude", "Everything I Know", and "Nakameguro". (Neo Soul, New Grooves) LP, Vinyl record album

The classic sound of Funkadelic, reworked by a key selection of contemporary talents from the Detroit scene – but never in a way that wrecks the originals at all! Unlike other remix projects, which might break up the music to a point that you can hardly recognize the original grooves – this set does a wonderful job of maintaining all the integrity of the famous funky recordings by the group, while also letting some artists from the group's hometown also include a few of their own contributions too – all in ways that really expand the original vision of the music, while keeping things in a funky soul vein all the way through! Given all the greateness of Detroit grooves in recent years – from that city's very fertile underground of producers and musicians – the sound here is still even more amazing than we expected, and the album's a very fitting one to be issued on the Westbound label. The set's double-length, and for good reason too – and titles include "Music 4 My Mother (Underground Resistance mix)", "Sexy Ways (Recloose disco flip)", "Get Your Ass Off & Jam (Marcellus Pittman rmx)", "You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure (Alton Miller mix)", "Super Stupid (Dirtbombs version)", "Music For My Mother (Andres Wo Ahh Ay voc mix)", "Cosmic Slop (Moodymann mix)", "Be My Beach (Mophono & Tom Thump)", "Let's Make It Last (Kenny Dixon Jr edit)", "Let's Take It To The Stage (Amp Fiddler @Ya mix)", "Undisco Kidd (Gay Marvine edit)", "Looking Back At You (Ectomorph stripped & dubbed)", and "Standing On The Verge (Anthony Shake Shakir & T Dancer rmx)". (Soul, New Grooves) LP, Vinyl record album