The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble is a group from San Diego who released their first album on Colemine Records back in 2015. The band’s last full-length album, Build Bridges, came in 2019. Now they are back once again with another full-length, Step Down.

The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble rock an instrumental style of soul and funk with a long history, drawing upon contemporaries like Budos Band and El Michels Affair, then going back through a lineage that includes Poets of Rhythm, The Meters, and The Bar-Kays, just to name a few. It’s a gritty and raw style of funk, the kind that sounds best with that sizzle coming from your record player in that short time in between the moment when you drop the needle and when the music starts. SFSE is a large group, with three percussionists, three horn players, keyboards, bass, guitar, and drums, which gives them a nice full sound. Of course, it only makes sense to rock a group this big if you can be tight enough to make it worth it, and you better believe that SFSE has tightened up over the last ten years, where they can work out these arrangements and just lay down these grooves that will have you bobbing your head and making stank face the whole album. Where SFSE takes the music to a special place is two-fold. One is that they find room to bring in some additional influences like hip hop and Afrobeat, subtly folding in musical ideas here and there, putting these other genres in direct conversation with the classic funk at their foundation. The other is that for an instrumental group, SFSE still understands that they can use their music to express political and social messages. After all, a lot has happened in the past three years that a multi-racial funk group might want to address, which they do on songs like the title track, “The Other Side,” “Time to Rebuild,” and “Love Age.” These aren’t just generic grooves, they are passionate and soulful songs that were written with a purpose, and you can hear the anger, the pain, and the love coming through each track.

Step Down is a great step up for The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble. The band has just been getting tighter with their playing, their arranging, and their songwriting over the years, and it all comes together to take that soul and funk to a special place on this album.