Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation (20008)

Here you’ll find everything you know and love about Thievery Corporation’s sound: reggae, dub, Indian, Latin, jazz, lounge, and on. They have really managed to sharpen their edges and even apply their hands to a little bluesy funk on “The Numbers Game”. It doesn’t seem like a stretch at all to call Radio Retaliation the “homme” to The Mirror Conspiracy’s “femme” vibe and classic Thievery sound. Guest musicians joining Hilton and Garza on this album include daughter of sitar master Ravi Shankar, and sitar virtuoso in her own right Anoushka Shankar, as well as Nigerian afro-beat star Femi Kuti, respected Brazilian vocalist Seu Jorge, Slovakian singer and violinist Jana Andevska, and DC-based “Godfather of Go-Go” Chuck Brown. Other personalities re-joining the duo, who we can easily regard as “the rest of the Corporation” are Sleepy Wonder, LouLou, Notch, Zee, and Verny Varela. Radio Retaliation, as more than just this review will tell you, is pure fire. Classic, classic, classic Thievery.At the same time, Retaliation is undeniably the group’s funkiest album to date, chock-full of punchy horns and chicken-scratch guitar numbers such as The Numbers Game, which finds go-go legend Chuck Brown convincingly huffing, cackling, and commanding the listener to “shake out your mind”. Even the slow-simmering, sitar-led Mandala eventually breaks out into a cathartic blast of DJ-scratching and triumphant trumpets. Like a well-meaning mother pureeing some carrots into the mac-and-cheese, Thievery arms its ear-candy with decidedly political undertones, from the anti-establishment mood of Sound the Alarm that kick off the album to the ominous marching-band percussion that propel (The Forgotten People).