Ghost Funk Orchestra – Walk Like a Motherfucker (2018)

Sometimes you discover music that is a pure injection of electric energy into your day. Ghost Funk Orchestra’s Walk like a Motherfucker (2018) is exactly the kind of joyous, self-assured, even arrogant single that makes you want to strut your bad ass down the street. Don’t think of Travolta here- this is all Shaft. Roll down the car windows and turn the whole world onto your good taste in music, just the feeling we need as spring comes closer. The combination of 60s girl-group vocals and snapping, funking rhythms can put that kick back into your step and kick out that gray winter haze clouding your vision.

Ghost Funk Orchestra’s album Walk like a Motherfucker is the vision of bandleader Seth Applebaum, who takes his obvious love of the funky, freaky music of Issac Hayes to fuel a modern retro banquet of exciting and surprisingly interesting sounds. Which is why another track is actually titled- of course- ‘Issac Hayes‘. To fully realize his vision, Applebaum uses nearly 20 musicians including multiple vocalists, the clarinet, violin, and cello. The result is an album that pays tribute to the past while it also pushes forward to the next chapter of the modern psychedelic scene.

Let’s be clear, Ghost Funk Orchestra isn’t just playing disposable retro music. The band is innovative and skilled at taking their influences and stretching out to more challenging areas of music. Each individual track breaks down and reshapes with longer instrumental passages that are often groovy and innovative. Incorporating elements of jazz, drone and psychedelia that takes you on an alternative journey through the highly visual spectrum of the sound.

We are in skillful hands with the Ghost Funk Orchestra. Each track is infused with retro sounds and reverberations, while challenging us with a musical synchronization and complexity that develops continuously throughout the unfolding of each track. The wild clarinet solo in ‘Broken Boogaloo’ turns the song into a psychedelic marvel which shows the band’s dedication to smart, effortless playing. This is an album that will lift your private party into the realms of another dimension, adding substance and sophistication to it without taking away from the good times.

Walk like a Motherfucker is a funky fuzzed-out trip that takes you far from the ordinary retro sounds of psychedelic and cinematic blaxploitation. Ghost Funk Orchestra is never satisfied to create the trappings of yesterday that so many other musicians and bands seem to fall into. Certainly there is a reverence for the amazing music of the past, but there is a sense of freedom here that pushes well beyond those limitations.

by Shawn Ciavattone