VA - Loving On The Flipside: Sweet Funk And Beat-Heavy Ballads 1969-1977 (2012) FLAC

Loving On The Flip Side collects the overlooked ballads from the flip sides of the funk 45s in the Now-Again and Truth and Soul vaults and is presented in the same format that we developed for our Soul Cal anthology. The music contained on Loving On The Flip Side is too damn good to be anonymously relaunched, decades after musical visionaries blended the best of heavy funk and sweet soul into a unified whole. Thus, Loving On The Flip Side again offers the enthused a chance to listen to, read about and reflect on another great burst of black American creativity: the creation of the sublime genre we like to call “sweet funk.”
It was the Darling Dears and Funky Heavy’s beautiful two-sider that set this record in motion, nearly ten years back. Those two songs precipitated the sweet funk genre: the dichotomy of Funky Heavy’s skull snapping rhythm section and the teenage Dears’ angelic harmonies didn’t sound like anything we’d heard before. That discovery set off a decade long search for the band and culminated in their discovery, the documenting of their stories, the emergence of their master tapes and the inclusion of their songs on Loving On The Flip Side.

The excitement we felt while listening to the Darling Dears and Funky Heavy’s masterworks forced us and the New York-based production team known as Truth & Soul back into the field, in search of other sweet funk swooners and beat-heavy ballads to round out this anthology. The opportunity to present anew such wondrous soul music made the exhaustive process that produced Loving On The Flip Side worthwhile, and allowed us to collect one-offs that escaped prior investigations into the deep funk and sweet soul genres.