POP MUSIC REVIEW : Infectious James Brown Grooves

Punk-funk has been touted as the next big thing for years, anywhere you go in the United States these days, you’re likely to run into stages-full of pumped young boy-bands, primed with recycled Funkadelic grooves secure in the knowledge that the Chili Peppers are going to hit it big any day now, just you wait. They have a lot of athletic stamina, these bands, but not all that much soul.

The Los Angeles neo-metal funk supergroup Infectious Grooves, which played its first-ever show Tuesday at a Roxy that was crowded as a Tokyo subway car at rush hour, has enough soul for all those bands.

IG came across almost like a punk-rock version of the JBs, the early-’70s precision-funk band of James Brown sidemen, with Suicidal Tendencies’ bassist Robert Trujillo as a mugging Bootsy, Excel’s guitarist Adam Siegel as a whacked-out Catfish and Suicidal’s Mike Muir as howling, pumping, sermonizing, sweating Mister JB himself--owwww- oooooo --the new hardest-working man in show business. Jane’s Addiction’s Steven Perkins, possibly the finest drummer in rock ‘n’ roll at the moment, seemed to lay down two tribal grooves at a time all by himself.

They’d slam into something that sounded like Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” upside down, then transform it into what resembled Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” played backward by Cameo; they’d take a popping Trujillo bass lick and turn it into a roaring metal riff.

Infectious Grooves may play the heaviest music that you can actually dance to. And though its first album has been out for only a few days, about two-thirds of the crowd seemed to know all the words.