MAN-CHILD

It took me a while to come around to the majority opinion that Man-Child is inferior to Thrust. Whereas Thrust felt like an inferior photocopy of Head Hunters, this one does at least feed the jazz-funk direction of the band back into the spacier, more esoteric territory that the Mwandishi-era lineup had made its own to create an intriguing soundscape which sounds halfway between dreamy space journey progressive jazz fusion and raw, raunchy softcore porn jazz-funk. At the same time, however, there's a major problem: none of the material here is as good as the Mwandishi era albums, and the jazz-funk side of the album's sound has dated worse than the Head Hunters lineup's other outings.