If I was organizing a party and I wanted to make it a really good party, I’d get Andy Frasco & The U.N. ‘round to play a few tunes. I’m not sure that they’d all fit in my living room (alongside core members Andrew Frasco (lead vocals & keys), Shawn Eckels (guitar & vocals), Ernie Chang (sax), Andee Avila (drums) and Supaman (bass), they have a large and eclectic rotating membership), but I’d put a few in the kitchen maybe and a couple on the stairs and people could just dance ‘round them.
That’s what they are really, a fabulous band for dancing ‘round.
Frasco’s style is a mixture of dirty blues and retro funk and soul, all given a modern makeover with plenty of horn thrown in. That’s an essential part of the mix. It’s almost impossible to imagine Andy Frasco & The U.N. without horn. Their music is all about happiness, sex, good times, sex, love, and being a free spirit. And horn.
And if at this point I’m giving you the impression that this album is the product of a one-track mind, well let’s settle on two-track. Because there’s a lot of great music in there as well. And music and lasciviousness have a long and honourable shared history. Frasco’s music is fun music. And who doesn’t like fun? Frasco calls it an adrenalin shot of pure escapism.
“We want people to be happy,” is his musical mission statement. “To smile at their faults, love life for what it is, and follow the beat of their own drum. We’re just trying to throw a party and get people to turn off their phones, leave their stress and complications at the door, live in the moment and just celebrate life for a few hours. If by the end of the night I see 90% of the room laughing and smiling, then I know I did my job.”
It’s also music that reconnects with that era before rock and soul split apart, when musicians of all races could share a stage without anyone even commenting. Frasco cites Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, Buddy Guy, The Band, Samantha Fish and Houndmouth as blues players who inspire him and while it’s an unusual list, it’s a good one. This week of all weeks maybe we should add Prince and Beyoncé in there too, people who can transcend artistic and cultural barriers as if they weren’t there, making music that speaks to everyone.
The band have spent the past few years living in vans and playing 250+ shows a year, and according to Frasco this is the first of their CDs to really capture their unique live style (which is not to say that the others are bad by any means – check out 2007’s Half a Man for confirmation).
Album opener, “Tie You Up”, kicks off with a burst of deeply funky, loping bass that can’t help reminding you of Amy Winehouse (maybe she should be in that list too) and it’s almost a surprise when Frasco’s vocal kicks in rather than hers, but he’s got that same sly, knowing vocal thing going on, and the track builds into a great little rocker as does the second track “You’re the Kind of Crazy That I Like”, a tribute to the manifold joys of being involved with mad women.
The scene once set the album keeps up a breakneck pace with tracks that range from 1970s slap bass funk on “Doin’ It”, evocations of Motown’s golden age on the snappily titled “Blame It On the Pussy” (see what they did there?), the Zuton-esque (neologism alert) “Good Ride”, a madcap blues stomp on the superb “Mature As Fuck”, some whistling reggae on “Here’s To Letting You Down” and even a smutty Hawaiian torch ballad called “Let’s Get Down To Business”.
It’s certainly an album that lets the band show their versatility and there isn’t a track on there that would make you even think about skipping it. A fine thing for keeping in the CD player in the car, although probably not child-friendly enough for the school run – parental advisory and all that, you know.
