Search - Expansion Union :: World Wide Funk

Club culture's electro revival has gone on so long that it could even be called an electro rerevival. Primitive squelchy synths, vocoderized pronouncements about the intergalactic origins of the coming funk invasion, thin drum timbres--head out onto a dance floor and you can be sure of one thing: something wiki-wiki-wiki this way comes. On their debut, World Wide Funk, the New York duo Expansion Union only slightly update the electro-funk sound that jumpstarted the hip-hop and techno revolutions in the early 1980s. There's some new-school hip-hop courtesy of Kool Keith sidekick Sir Menelik on "Lord of Thought" and some muscular trip-hop on "Crash." But mostly Expansion Union stick to the original Bronx blueprint, slicing and dicing "White Lines" on "Step to It" and building a scratch-full electro jam around an Onyx sample on the attention-getting "Playing with Lightning" (a meatier version accompanies the climactic battle scene in Blade), reminding us again and again why rock, rock, planet rock still hasn't stopped. --Jeff Salamon