Pleasure

While they were eclipsed in fame and sales by their bigger-charting mid-late ’70s Mercury releases, the four albums Dayton’s Ohio Players recorded for Westbound in the first half of the decade would earn belated props for the adventurous, experimental, sometimes thoroughly bizarre spark the music boasted beneath the scandalous S&M packaging. And if Pleasure stands out above the other three in this de facto quadrilogy, it’s because it’s where all their nascent ideas started to really cohere: funk steeped in soul-jazz progressions, unlikely intersections of romanticism and irreverence, and the sheer joy of goofball novelty taken just unseriously enough to make the actual improv-friendly, jam-heavy chops stand out that much more. Writer/keyboardist Walter “Junie” Morrison gets to show off as a major part of their sound, and this pays off big: the Granny-voiced, ARP synth-showcasing “Funky Worm” was the surprise breakout hit that a successive generation of g-funkateers would spend the ’90s mutating, and the fluid liveliness of his playing adds depth to both their dance-minded jams (“Walt’s First Trip,” “Laid It,” and especially the supreme vamp of the title-cut opener) and the odder corners of their balladry (highlighted on the goth-soul intensity of bedroom-as-cemetery metaphor “Our Love Has Died”). But as tempting as it is to single out individual performers — guitarist Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner, bassist Marshall “Rock” Jones, drummer Greg Webster, and everyone who picked up a horn for these sessions play their ass off — Pleasure‘s pleasing because it’s a collective effort that’s as reverent with their nods to earlier soul traditions (check out the classic close-harmony R&B of “Varee Is Love”) as they are restless with their drive to create new ones.