Meters – Zony Mash

Zony Mash rounds up 13 tracks from the Josie era that didn’t appear on the Meters’ first trio of albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s, eight of them from non-LP singles, five of them from the bonus tracks added to Sundazed’s CD reissues of those LPs. As such, it’s not recommended as one of the first Meters albums to buy if you’re just starting to build a collection of the band’s work. Actually, however, were this the first album of Josie-era material you were to hear or buy, it wouldn’t disgrace the band’s legacy by any means. On both vocal and instrumental numbers, the band offers first-rate tight yet rubbery funk-soul. And it’s not like this stuff went totally unheard at the time: three of the songs (“A Message from the Meters,” “(The World Is a Bit Under the Weather) Doodle-Oop,” and “Stretch Your Rubber Band”) were small R&B chart hits. Plenty of contemporary soul-funk influences are floating around, like Booker T. & the MG’s on “Soul Machine” and the title cut, the wah-wah psychedelia of Hendrix and others, and the rhythms of James Brown. At some moments they sound uncannily like early War, though given the dates of these recordings, it’s more likely that War borrowed from the Meters than vice versa. But it’s more the Meters’ own funkified brand of New Orleans R&B than anything else, even on the graceful cover of Bacharach/David’s “The Look of Love.”