Kutiman

Ophir "Kutiman" Kutiel is a 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer based in Tel Aviv. When a friend introduced him to the sounds of 1960s funk and Afro-beat, he was immediately entranced, and this album was the eventual result. It shows clearly that he's been listening hard to the records of his heroes — Fela Kuti, James Brown, Sly Stone — and that he's learned a lot from them. It also shows his impressive instrumental chops. What the album lacks is a critical mass of interesting songs, or even grooves that are substantial enough to sustain a full song's length. "Bango Fields" starts off fairly strong, but never develops enough to be worth listening to for the full four minutes; the horn chart on "No Reason for You" is very nice, but the sung melody is nowhere; "Take a Minute" is nicely jazzy, but doesn't have enough substance to it to actually be jazz. The album's strongest tracks are the ones that have something of an edge to them: the drum sound on "Losing It" has a certain sharpness and the keyboard sound has a certain trashiness, and those elements give the song a dimension that's missing from most of the rest of the program. And "Music Is Ruling My World" boasts the best, nastiest, James Brown- funk groove of the album and takes things out with a bang. Kutiman has definitely got what it takes, and future efforts will undoubtedly show his talent continuing to mature and develop. His debut sounds like it wasn't quite ready to come out of the oven, though.