Kevin Bronson on May 17th, 2017

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Bobby Blunders make the kind of music you’d bring to a stoned soul picnic. Begun a decade ago as the home recording project of Free Moral Agents’ Jesse Carzello, Bobby Blunders culled three or so years’ worth of recordings into the genre-spanning album “Best Neighborhood Band” — the neighborhood being Long Beach — a deluxe version of which was just released. While “Neighborhood” featured an all-star cast from LBC, Carzello has now settled in with an ensemble of vocalists Tiffany Davy and AJ “Pastor Freeman” Butler and guitarist Michael J. Salter, prepping a new EP, “Loving Imposter.” The single “Plummeting Further Still” bumps right out of the 1970s, a desperate plea for love that is balanced, Carzello says, “by these reservations or feelings that one should keep his or her cards close for now … to not frighten the other person off.” The tentativeness in that sentiment is thrown to the wind by song’s end: “Down, I wish you would come with me,” the Pastor wails. Inspired, the songwriter says, by Sly Stone and other idiosyncratic funk from that era (e.g., War, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Bohannon and Shuggie Otis), the song’s the playful arrangements, blasts of organ and passionate dual vocals add up to one hell of a good time, no matter the vintage.

||| Stream: “Plummeting Further Still”

||| Also: Stream “Best Neighborhood Band” in its entirety here

||| Live: Bobby Blunders perform with Asi Fui and Painted Gold at 4th Street Vine in Long Beach on May 20.