Karate Boogaloo Release Access All Areas

Karate Boogaloo make instrumental funk that tells a story without a single word, and their new album, Access All Areas, came out on 9 October.

The Melbourne quartet's third studio album keeps to a plain brief: straightforward songs, played together in a room rather than assembled piece by piece. The earlier single, "Wet Day Timetable", shows the approach. It opens with brushed drums, wistful guitar chords and a drifting organ line, then settles into a groove. The band describe it as a tune that nearly arrived fully formed.

The lineage is easy to hear: The Meters, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, The J.B.'s. The tape-recorded warmth gives it a character of its own. Far Out Magazine's review plays on the band's library-music leanings, music made to sit in the background, and finds it more noteworthy than that brief suggests.

For a rainy Amsterdam evening, it fits.

Out now on digital and physical formats via Bandcamp.