Earlier this year, D.C. producer Damu the Fudgemunk released an album with emcee Flex Matthews called Dreams & Vibrations. After enough people asked, Damu went back and reworked and packaged the instrumental tracks and is now releasing them as the instrumental album, Victorious Visions.

Sometimes instrumental versions of albums are merely tools, mostly used by other artists. Sometimes they are included as bonus material when you buy an album. Every so often, though, you come across an album like Victorious Visions, which just completely stands apart as its own thing. The first clue that this wasn’t just another instrumental version of a vocal album is that Damu went through the trouble of renaming the album, so that it stood apart in name. Fortunately, the work that Damu put into the album match the naming strategy. If you never heard Dreams & Vibrations, you could listen to Victorious Visions and completely enjoy it on its own. It’s an album full of great grooves and good melodies, heavy on the funk and soul. Damu knows just how to create these grooves with big, fat pockets to them that will have you bobbing your head for days. On top of that, he does a great job of creating these melodic hooks that will actually stick in your head well after the album is over. The tracks are also well developed and move at a steady pace, so that you can enjoy the groove of each track and let it soak in but never get stuck in neutral. There’s nothing static about this album, which can often be the case when producers don’t take the time to reshape and rework the previous material. Damu took the time to do that, and in the process, he’s given us an instrumental album that really stands up on its own.

Damu the Fudgemunk has been making music for several years now, and he holds himself to a certain standard. When there was a demand for an instrumental version of Dreams & Vibrations, you knew he wasn’t just going to dump the exact tracks from the album sans vocals. Instead, he reworks the instrumental tracks in such a way that you don’t even notice that there aren’t any vocals. It sounds like an original instrumental album, and quite a good one at that. That’s what you get when a veteran producer cares enough to do things right.