Daptone 7 Inch Singles Collection Vol. 2

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

Of course Brooklyn funk factory Daptone Records isn’t going present its label compilations in a neat, tidy, chronological way. Daptone’s entire aesthetic is based on willfully aping the inconsistencies of the pre-disco R&B labels as well as the earth-shaking artists they brought forth, and in so doing a collection like Daptone 7 Inch Singles Collection, Vol. 2 does its wink-work by throwing its wares together more or less willy-nilly. It’s as if they’re saying — and because Daptone exudes its collector mentality front and center, they are saying — that you should’ve gotten the actual vinyl the first time if you wanted to hear the story as it evolved, rather than as part of a highlights reel.

But highlights reels often get parties going, and the 13 tracks here testify that this is the label’s real raison d'être, whatever its retro trappings. Down-to-the-ground cuts like Charles Bradley & the Bullets’ atom-splitting blues-funk “This Love Ain’t Big Enough for the Two of Us” and Lee Fields’ churchy ballad “Could Have Been” still sound precisely like they were recorded three or four decades before they were, but they work in ways their perfect reproductive quality hasn’t got much to do with. Not that these artists — all essentially the same pool of musicians backing different singers and occasionally branching off into their own bag — don’t have fun with that identification with the old stuff: just check Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings turning Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s pop-psych classic, “I Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In” into swingin’ ’60s mod-soul. But they’re also expanding beyond the funk and Afrobeat that has been Daptone’s specialty: the final song on Vol. 2 is a cover of salsa giant Héctor Lavoe’s “Che Che Cole” by Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. This may just mean Daptone’s advancing into the mid-’70s rather than a few years earlier, but when the results move like this, that’s fine.