| In 2009, Kings Go Forth burst onto the international soul/funk underground with a series of three self-released 45 rpm singles. (The first disc, "One Day" b/w "You're the One," was pressed in an edition of 500 copies that now command up to $200 apiece on various Internet auction sites.) Now signed to Luaka Bop, The Outsiders Are Back was preceded by a 12-inch single, Don't Take My Shadow, containing multiple mixes and edits created by the legendary Tom Moulton, a pioneering remixer of the early disco era. Here at last is a band creating its own immediately identifiable sound from a broad palette of classic R&B (mid-Sixties Chicago, early-Seventies Philadelphia, and other sources far more obscure); setting that sound to Black Wolf's timeless lyrics of love and loss, despair and hope and delivering it all with fierce urgency and undeniable emotional commitment. There is power in Kings Go Forth's multi-ethnic makeup, in their twenty-five year age span (from thirty to fifty-five), and in their unforced command of the soul music idiom. And to date, the soul revival has not produced another band with a vocal blend so rich in tone and feeling. |
