The Invaders:

There probably weren't too many Bermuda based funk bands. If there were, they didn't get enough publicity. That mostly pointed at the Invaders, though.

The group, a sextet, was discovered by Eddy Demello, a producer vacationing on the island. Previously, Demello had worked with a wide variety of acts, even including a garage band or two. But what he heard in the Invaders' music was a sound that wasn't exactly tied to the tripped out funk stuff making headway in the States, but pretty close.

Counting its island home as the reason the band is able to rave up a groove, but render it in laid back terms, doesn't explain its predilection for all that reverb. Each track arrives replete with enough echoed instrumentation to make songs sound as if they're being performed by a much larger group.

The Invaders' lone album, Spacing Out, opens with a cover, surprisingly, but then moves into a few originals before landing at a Meters' appropriation. At points it's difficult to discern if one track has ended and another has begun, but that might speak to the singularity of the ensemble's vision. There's no shortage of strutting funk stuffs here as the title track, "Where We Are" and "Lost Time" present a band that was adept at a very specific style of funk: the most tripped out variety.

Recorded and issued by Duane Records in 1970, the Invaders turned in an instrumental affair, sounding as if it came out of some tiny Southern town that just didn't have the population to support the dance band. That obviously wasn't the case. But the Invaders cut its collective teeth working the hotel circuit in Bermuda. The scenario mirrors the situation in Jamaica as talented musicians having no really infrastructure to work with were relegated to entertaining vacationing Americans. While that set-up sounds like nothing short of a tremendous bummer, it enabled Demello to hear the band. And that's a bonus.

Ty Karim:

I just realized that Breaks hasn't featured any women. So, firstly, my apologies. And secondly, Ty Karim is probably as accessible an act as anything that's been featured here.

Part of that has to do with the fact that Karim's voice is a bit deeper than one might expect a soul singer to work with. But the gruffness in her singing, which doesn't quite get into Tina Turner territory, serves to toughen up some of the love songs that Karim and her husband Kent Harris worked out through the '60s, '70s and early '80s.

Best known for "Lighten Up Baby" and its subsequent reworking as "Lightin' Up" in terms of a loungey construction, Karim made a career out of being a local celebrity in Los Angeles. Her recordings, for whatever reason didn't really impact the soul charts outside of home. But in the ensuing years, the soul and nascent funk that Karim and Harris worked with made inroads with the Northern Soul crowd in England.

Karim wasn't exactly lost to time, but her daughter, after reading an article about her mother and realizing that there were still fans out there, sought to solidify the singer's legacy. Approaching Ace Records with master takes of over twenty songs, Los Angeles' Soul Goddess (1965-1980) was cobbled together making Karim's music easy to locate again. Its relative ease of access should find the languid soul stuff of "Don't Let Me Lonely Tonight" and the album's other offerings inserted into any variety of mixes. We'll see, though. Karim was a slept on commodity the first time around. Hopefully, that won't happen again.