Spacing Out is the epitome of Psychedelic Funk – an exceedingly rare album sought out by rock, funk, soul and hip hop sample fiends – and bootlegged – for decades. This is the first official reissue of the album, done with the license and participation of the entire Invaders band, with their story told in great detail in an oversized booklet penned by Jefferson “Chairman” Mao, complete with rare photos of this rarely seen ensemble.
BUY THE LP NOW AT BANDCAMP» The Invaders – Spacing Out
Spacing Out is instrumental masterpiece only ever issued in Bermuda at the turn of 1970. A mix of the band’s out-there original compositions and extravagant covers of The Meters, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin and Isley Brothers, it established this band as one of the greatest instrumental bands of any genre, and helped kickstart the retro-soul/funk scenes that birthed the likes of Daptone and Big Crown Records. It’s certainly a lode star for Now-Again Records.
From the proverbial stank face-inducing opening bars of reverb-drenched drums and congas that announce The Invaders’ 1970 album, Spacing Out, you’re thrust into something visceral and fleeting: a pocket universe in which technical excess, chemistry between players, and the uninhibited energy of youth align in a kind of glorious imperfection. Spacing Out is one of the greatest instrumental deep funk albums of its or any period in that unmistakably raw – honest – way only a crew of largely self-taught young’uns could catch a groove.
Mysteriously dub-like in its audio and visual presentation, it’s exemplary of what George Clinton cited when he explained funk as, “Anything it needs to be to save your life at that time.”James Brown had already aged well into adulthood when he alchemized the essential elements of funk. But the Godfather’s late ’60s rhythm revolution (and its subsequent exponents and permutations) inspired countless kids barely out of their teens to pick up instruments, form bands and attack the R&B songbook with a ferocity that prioritized proper allegiance to the One. Funk’s youth movement reverberated across the globe. And in the curious case of The Invaders, ascended across an imagined echo-imbued cosmos from a tropical island blast-off in Bermuda.
The title track lays out the band’s funk bonafides: a relentlessly tight conga-filled groove, Ralph and Lloyd’s punchy wall of intertwined horn leads, and raucous unintelligible background vocals adding extra mystique. Above all was the exaggerated deployment of reverb and echo (a decision most of the group’s members credit to recording engineer Ian Marshall) which ricocheted off and reanimated every lick as an otherworldly transmission, infusing a vibe both earthy and interstellar.