Cultures of Soul
When it comes to spaced-out jazz funk Stanton Davis’ Brighter Days is a stone cold cult classic praised for its unique free-flowing mix of cosmic grooves disco-tinted atmospheres and sky-scraping horn movements. So it’s no surprise that the reissue heads at Cultures of Soul have revisited the 1977 album for the new collection Isis Voyage .
Made up of previously unreleased tracks and alternate mixes from the Brighter Days sessions the compendium further proves that Davis and his Ghetto Mysticism Band were really on to something. Many of the newly earthed versions of Brighter Days tracks like “Space-A-Nova” “Funky Fried Tofu” and “Things Cannot Stop Forever” find the players in a looser more exploratory head space giving the songs a richer more playful vibe. Unreleased cuts “Isis Voyage” and “Delta Six/Brighter Days” meanwhile especially stand out weaving in psychedelic brass passages exotic synth textures and crushing almost post-rock-like bass lines into some truly epic future jams. To add a little icing U.K. remixer Al Kent exemplifies the group’s dancefloor tendencies by reworking a pair of tracks into some straight-up mutant disco monsters à la Arthur Russell and Walter Gibbons.
Even without knowing the original Brighter Days the Isis Voyage comp is a perfect gateway into the far-out world of Stanton Davis who still sounds like a musical visionary from a galaxy far far away all these years later.
