Album of the Week, November 8, 2025
Delvon Lamarr is one of many artists who have benefited from exposure on KEXP (about which I’ve written many times before). In this particular case, though, his career was significantly boosted. The band had a set they were playing on KEXP’s Upstream Festival in May 2017, and they stopped by the studio to warm up. KEXP’s camera crew happened to catch the warm up session, and posted it to YouTube. Eleven million views later, the band’s trajectory was in a new orbit. Sometimes it happens like that.
KEXP came on board with Colemine Records to issue the record of the live performance, which debuted on Record Store Day in 2018. It features a few of the performances from that live video plus some more, and stands as a gripping testament of the power of R&B powered funk to “move… and remove, dig?”
“Move On Up” is one of the tracks from the warm-up show; in the audio from YouTube, Lamarr notes “We’re going to start with a tune that should be familiar to most of you guys” before launching with the band into the Curtis Mayfield banger. The tune starts with just Jimmy James, sketching out the chords, before Lamarr enters on a crescendoing chord and David McGraw crashes out the beat. The playing is energetic and forthright; it’s impossible to hear and not dance.
“Memphis” is a laid-back version of the original from Close But No Cigar. Where the original could occasionally feel formulaic, here the band is tight and relaxed, not giving the guitar lick on the chorus until the second repetition. Lamarr’s solo swerves up into the upper range of the instrument, embracing different tempi (at one point almost grinding to a stop even as the guitar and drums carry forward) and generally laying down the funk. And then there’s Jimmy James. The guitar solo on “Memphis” is probably worth four to six million of the 11 million YouTube views that this performance racked up. Starting out with a staccato riff, James runs through triplets and eighth note runs before taking off into outer space. At one point you can clearly hear what sounds for all the world like a power bass player; the YouTube video pans down from the keyboard to show Lamarr knocking that bass line out with his left stockinged foot on the pedals. The whole thing is a piece of casually funky brilliance.
“South Leo St. Stomp,” called “Untitled” in the YouTube video, starts out immediately from “Memphis” with a steady four-four beat from McGraw, turning into a little cha-cha and syncopated funk as Lamarr and James enter. This is the video that prompted a YouTube commenter to post, “My watch just asked the drummer what the time is”—he’s so in the pocket, so flawlessly on, that it’s like hearing a funky, funky metronome. Jimmy James sounds more like Jimi Hendrix on this one, with the guitar threatening to take off at one point, but everything circles back to the relaxed beat once more to bring it to a close. The whole time, there have been more and more people coming up outside the windows of the performance space to listen, including a couple of very young listeners excitedly talking with their grown-ups about the sound.
The second half is devoted to the band’s actual Upstream Festival set, starting with “Concussion.” This version of the band’s debut single clocks in at a tight 4:27 but feels more laid back than the record version, between McGraw’s deeply in-the-pocket drumming and James’ mellow but focused guitar. Lamarr’s organ still has that perfect rhythm underneath, but he finds more melodic room in the solo. Jimmy James gives us a perfectly executed single-verse solo that comes in like a helicopter over the jungle to lay down bursts of funk. He’s in, freaky, and right back out. It feels like a well-worn pair of jeans.
Lamarr introduces “I Don’t Want to Play That” as “another new song, brand new… like Monday new.” The original is a deeply groovy ballad that feels like a tango in hip-huggers, thanks to the intersection between the band’s tight rhythm and the bluesy minor melodic solo from Lamarr. The band rolls right into “Tacoma Black Party,” an original named after a slip of the lip from Lamarr’s manager (and wife) Amy Novo. A feature for Jimmy James, the tune builds to a climax in the first chorus with his guitar climbing to the fifth and sixth of the scale, and then the whole band dropping out save for a few quiet notes in the organ, climbing up the scales. James melts the guitar, and our faces, with another Hendrix solo that crashes down octaves, briefly becomes polychordal, and slides all the way down to the bottom of his range until the band circles back around to the close.
The band closes with a properly funky version of Freddie Wilson’s “Top Going Down, Bottom Going Up,” originally made famous by Nathan Bartell. The band is totally locked in, with James giving a tight riff around the edges of the chorus but otherwise staying in support mode for this one. A monstrous solo from Lamarr has the crowd dancing all the way to the end, when James closes with a minor-key nod to “Jingle Bells.”
YouTube took the solidly soulful throwback sound of Lamarr and his band and made them minor stars. We’ll hear more from the band next week as things start to change.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: There can’t be any bonus better than that 2017 warm-up session, so here it is! The first half of the record was recorded as one single video (the 11-million view one, now up above 15 million), but the second half performances are available as individual videos as well. Watch ’em in order for the whole show, minus a little of the linking chatter.