Kool & the Gang had done ambitious stuff before; as a funk group conversant in jazz, they’d just concluded their previous party-jam-packed album Wild and Peaceful with a namesake piece that skewed far closer to Yusef Lateef than the J.B.’s. But Kool & the Gang’s balancing act between crowdpleasing dance funk and exploratory prog-R&B chops hit its longest stride on Light of Worlds, thriving off spiritually focused songwriting that felt just as transcendent in its instrumental journeys. “Summer Madness” is the latter category’s crown jewel — one of the group’s most beloved pieces, an initially casual-seeming smooth-jazz glide that Ronald Bell’s humid conflagration of a performance on the ARP 2600 turns into an undeniable argument that synths can have a soul. There’s a more down-to-earth yet vitally joyful liveliness in the two singles that preceded it — R&B chart-topper “Higher Plane,” which built off the monomaniacal momentum of “Jungle Boogie”’s get-down mantras to more elaborate and euphoric ends, and #3 R&B hit “Rhyme Tyme People,” which does for existential ambivalence what “Hollywood Swinging” did for Los Angeles. As for the rest, good luck separating the deep cuts from the stuff that met its hit potential — Dilla’s Donuts might’ve shed an extra bit of light on “Fruitman” 32 years later, but its eat-healthy message has plenty of giddy warmth to spare in its original form, and “Light of Worlds” itself is a minor classic of Black social consciousness, a secular-humanist, new age-conversant perspective meeting an audience looking for any ray of hope they can find.

Great 1974 studio outing for New Jersey funksters Kool & The Gang, a mix of their big, bold, elephantine street funk, some accessible soul, and some quality jazz. Opener “Street Corner Symphony” is classic Kool funk with jazzy-inflected horn riffs where they once again prove themselves masters of the anticipatory vamp, holding and holding that chord while an atonal screech of sax elevates the tension. Track 8 “Summer Madness,” a near-perfect musical evocation of the heavy, slow, close heat of summer merits a mention as nearly 50 years later it’s still a perennial favourite with many soul fans as well as new generations of ‘chill out’ fans. Light Of Worlds’ funk is intense, full-pelt and multi-layered, a mesh of interlocked guitar lines, clavs, keys and percussion with a big, prominent bass sound and little synth touches, but it comes with an air of being pristinely arranged and carefully executed, falling somewhere between the organised chaos of P-Funk and the terse, rigid JBs sound. One of K&TG’s best.