The Round Robin Monopoly — Alpha (2024 Remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (June 2024)
With this reissue of Alpha — the sole release by Los Angeles eight-piece combo the Round Robin Monopoly — the Jazz Dispensary team has once again rescued a long-lost slab of funky weirdness from underserved obscurity. Alpha was originally released in 1974 on Truth Records, a largely forgotten Stax imprint that issued fewer than a dozen albums between 1973 and 1975. It only had one pressing, it’s so funky that crate-diggers have long coveted it, and, most importantly, it has a take on groove-oriented soul music that is highly idiosyncratic. That uniqueness starts with the album’s sequencing: of the 10 tracks, only seven are actual “songs.” The first and last pieces — “Alpha” and “Omega” — are instrumental bits that run less than a minute, while the penultimate track, “Prayer of the Prisoner” is a woeful, piano-based bit of recitation that lasts just 73 seconds, but does manage to include the fantastic line, “By the way, I love you, too, God.” However, the 27 minutes in between them is chock-full of a sublime fusion of post-psychedelic soul, tightly-wound funk, horn-driven rock, a touch of Latin percussion, and even more lyrical gems (“I’d rather loan you out than let you go” is an all-timer, to be sure.) Interestingly, the tune where all of these elements come together the best is the album’s mellowest; “Dreamers” is appropriately atmospheric and faintly psychedelic, with a punchy horn line and a slinky groove that combine to make the song quite genre-agnostic, but nonetheless effective. More straightforward are jams like “Little People” and “Average Man,” which lyrically capture the “we’ll take care of it ourselves” malaise of the mid-’70s, but are musically effervescent, with a driving rhythm section pushing the crowd-pleasing melodies over the top.
