SPIN's 10 Best Reissues of 2012

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10 of 10
December 14 2012, 11:24 AM ET

#1

VARIOUS ARTISTS - COUNTRY FUNK 1969-1975 (LIGHT IN THE ATTIC)

"Country funk" wasn't an actual movement or genre with a bin card and scene bylaws and over-arching aesthetics — not something nearly as organized as, say, seapunk. So it's hard to pinpoint exactly what this 16-track comp is celebrating. The twilight years of the AM radio melting pot? A collection of too-twangy-for-prime time, crate-digger dead-ends? (The opening five seconds of Johnny Adams' "Georgia Morning Dew" is practically begging to be flipped.) The genesis point for Beck's Mellow Gold or Bubba Sparxxx's Deliverance or Big & Rich's Horse of a Different Color or Buck 65's Talkin' Honky Blues or Imani Coppola's "Cowboy"? Or just the warped whimsy of the three record nerds (Light in the Attic's Matt Sullivan, Patrick McCarthy, and DJ Zach Cowie) who compiled it? The Country Funk comp lives at the middle point of some insane Venn diagram where you could somehow cohesively join experiments from gospel-soul lifer Adams going headknock, blues guitarist Johnny Jenkins out-grooving a Dr. John cover, country star Bobbie Gentry getting moves like Jagger, and aging rockabilly icon Link Wray going funky apocalypse. Everything is somewhere between CCR and Sly Stone and often the artist was only trying for one or neither. C.W.