Iron Leg

"Mickey and the Soul Generation are my favorite funk band," declares Josh "DJ Shadow" Davis in his impassioned and surprisingly heartfelt liner notes to Iron Leg. On the one hand, it seems like pure hyperbole — the group's music is excellent, make no mistake, but there's no ground here that wasn't traversed earlier and more memorably by funk outfits both far more notable and far more obscure. But sometimes it's about more than just the music, and as Davis' liners detail, his transformation from Mickey fan to musicologist to cheerleader affected him deeply — fascinated after discovering the single "Iron Leg" on a compilation, he graduated from collecting the band's records to tracking down the members themselves, eventually organizing a reunion and even this CD. And in the sense that Davis' career has in large part been built around his uncommon flair for rediscovering and reconfiguring music once consigned to cut-out bins, Iron Leg is as much as definitive overview of an obscure funk band as it is the ultimate DJ Shadow homage — it's music so good, so insistent, that it needs none of his scratching or mixing to make it better.