Track Listing

1. Hey Pocky Way
2. Sweet Honey Dripper
3. Fire on the Bayou
4. Ten Commandments of Love
5. Sitting in Limbo
6. Brother John/Iko Iko
7. Mona Lisa
8. Run Joe

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100900 in Music
• Released on: 1990-06-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Amazon.com
The Neville Brothers, as a working unit, emerged as a result of 1976's magnificent Wild Tchoupitoulas project. On that album, the Brothers and their Meters cohorts backed a group of tribal chiefs (including their uncle "Big Chief Jolly") singing traditional Mardi Gras "war songs" and marches. The Nevilles' 1978 debut left behind their New Orleans foundation and suffered because of it. However, 1981's Fiyo represents the pinnacle of the Neville collective, a percolating mix of R&B, soul, funk, and Caribbean rhythms that celebrates their Crescent City heritage. The standards, of course, are entrusted to Aaron's heavenly pipes, but it's the New Orleans anthems that would come to define both the band and the city. --Marc Greilsamer

Customer Reviews

Maybe the Best Ever!
If I were marooned on a desert island with only this disc, a CD player (eternally powered, somehow), and lots of rum (an eternal supply, somehow) to drink out of coconuts, I'd the happiest man alive. Just the Mardi Gras Indian anthem "Brother John" (mixed here with the classic "Iko Iko") is well worth the price of the disc. The first time I heard it, every hair on my body stood at attention. It's de funk, it's de Caribbean, it's de celestial harmonies of brother Aaron at the high end, brothers Art and Cyril at the low; it's New Orleans at its carnival best, and it just don't get better than that.

Has This Album Really Been Forgotten?
I bought this album years ago, I believe at the beginning of the '90's when it had been touted as one of the best albums of the previous decade. To look now and see it selling for $6 with only two amazon reviews is a little disconcerting. I can't imagine that the New Orleans R&B/Funk sound has ever been captured more perfectly in a studio environment. Four of these songs (Hey Pocky Way, Sweet Honey Dripper, Fire on the Bayou and Brother John/Iko Iko) are among the most rollicking and intense performances I've ever heard on record. Run Joe is an infectious midtempo rocker and the cover of Jimmy Cliff's ballad Sitting in Limbo is beautiful.

But wait, aren't there 8 tracks on the album? Unfortunately, yes. Aaron's two syrupy ballad covers are atrocious. Regardless of whether you like the songs in and of themselves (I don't), there can be no doubt that they destroy the momentum and pacing of what could have been a perfect album. In the CD era, I couldn't lunge for my remote fast enough to forward through those tracks. But in the iPod era, no problem: slice 'em, dice 'em and leave them on the cutting room floor. For this price, who cares if you're left w/ less than 30 minutes of music? Edited down, this can't be beat.

Buy it and do other potential buyers a service by not letting this go out of print.

Totally Funkalicious
This CD was only available as an import for the longest time. I paid three times amazon's current price, and I definitely got my money's worth, many times over.

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