Elevate

If you’re a long-time Lettuce fan, this album delivers in all the ways you’d expect: cool grooves, spacey guitar lines, and of course super-tight horn arrangements. But there’s three tracks in particular that I feel deserve a special mention... Royal Highness: this intense slap-you-in-the-face groove just keeps getting better as it goes along. It’s so funky it gives me palpitations. Don’t listen while driving, because you’ll drive straight off the road! Everybody Wants To Rule The World: this is NOT the type of song you’d ever expect Lettuce to cover, but the arrangement is so good that it makes it sound like an original. I didn’t even recognize it until about halfway in, and then it hit me: “ohhh, THAT song!” Very reminiscent of Soulive’s cover of OutKast’s Prototype (maybe both arranged by Ryan Zoidis?). Ready To Live: this one just blows me away at how much it sounds like a 1970’s Lenny Williams/Chester Thompson-era Tower of Power hit. From the pumping Rocco-style bass lines to the vocals to the rhythm guitar to the horn arrangements to the percussion, they absolutely NAILED that sound. It’s unbelievable! The rest of the album is great too, but I’d buy it just for those three tracks alone!