Rejuvenation

The Meters’ laid-back yet intense style of funk continued evolving on 1974’s <i>Rejuvenation</i>, their fifth album and second for Reprise. Co-producing with the great Allen Toussaint, the quartet filled out their sound with the subtle deployment of horns and female backing singers — not to mention the increasing use of guitarist Leo Nocentelli’s own lead vocals. The result helped them fit in a little more comfortably with the rest of the funk pack, but didn’t alter the group’s interplay, which remained as singular as that of the JB’s. And New Orleans stuck to Nocentelli’s vowels on tracks like the midtempo assertion of blackness “Jungle Man” and the lovely ballad “Love is for Me” as surely as it did Art Neville’s Longhair-style piano on “Hey Pocky-a-Way.”