Featured Artist: DVD: Yohimbe Brothers Feat. Vernon Reid & DJ Logic

CD Title: A Film By Jerome de Missolz

Year: 2008

Record Label: La Huit Presents: Freedom Now Collection

Style: Progressive

Review:

Here, French director Jerome de Missolz presents a trippy and psychedelic film of the Yohimbe Brothers in concert.  Featuring guitar hero Vernon Reid and turntable-master, DJ Logic, the band’s highly energized brand of funk, rap, metal, and Latin music generate lots of high-heat throughout.  However, Mathieu Foldes post-production synthesis of colors, fades and overlays of the actual footage rhymes with the overall musicality of the event.  Hence, the marketing verbiage advises that we should “listen to the film…watch the music.”

The overall experience is suitable for the film’s fifty-minute running time.  Thankfully, the editors and producers didn’t belabor the point.  But the total package reflects the band’s high-octane gait, chock full of driving pulses and Latasha Diggs’ good-natured rap and soul-drenched vocals.  And at times, Reid slams the proceedings into overdrive via his fuzz-toned, sustain based riffs while steering the band through knotty unison choruses. 

Foldes film manipulations adhere to the variable flows, whether Logic is spinning a fusion of warbling and scratch sounds or keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum decelerates the unit’s momentum with ethereal EFX textures.  While some of Foldes’ VJ techniques might elicit notions of a bygone era, he works his magic in parallel with the musicians’ thoroughly hip mode of attack.  For subsequent listens you can always leave the TV monitor off and just groove to the upbeat sounds of this undeniably, exhilarating quintet.

Record Label Website: http://www.lahuit.com

Listen or Buy: Amazon

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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