Lettuce Funk Your Face Off

When my good friend Pete Costello uses words like "flat out on fire," "Heavyweight Champions of Funk" and "BEST BAND IN THE GENRE" - at 10:08 am, mind you - I heed the call. After a day of loving my mother and sister and nieces and eating a sequence of bagels, lox, brownies and hot dogs while enjoying a supposed Tom Hanks marathon on TBS today, I took a detour back to Brooklyn via the Bowery Ballroom to see Lettuce. What I encountered was nine guys on stage in an unbreakable groove lock with each other. Boundless energy from the stage made it seem like it was a Saturday night in Detroit in 1972 - or at a raging funk party on Mars in the year 2054. The horns cut through the sea of sexy sounds from the band with a punchy staccato that's so clean and crisp it makes your hair stand up on its ends. Adam Deitch (omg, adam deitch...) is like the hip hop version of Stanton Moore and they've got him up on risers so you can just marvel at his skill to create mindblowing beats before your eyes.

From the looks of it, this is the end of their little jaunt (for which they apparently had zero rehearsal time beforehand and still sound tighter than anyone I've heard in a long while). But they'll be out and about during the summer and their new album RAGE! is available now - I found it here on HomeGrown.

Get a little dose of Lettuce right now over here: www.myspace.com/lettucefunk.