Budos Band Combine Their 'Grittiness' With Wu-Tang Clan on Mashup Album

Staten Island funk outfit Budos Band are pretty big Wu-Tang Clan fans. So when Spinner heard about the 'Wudos Band' mashup album -- a free internet-only release which pits classic Wu verses over beats culled from samples of Budos' analog funk -- we immediately reached out to them for their take, only to find that they knew about as much about the project as we did.

"We really actually don't know any real details about the project," baritone sax player and frontman Jared Tankel reveals. "We all kind of think it's pretty awesome. Some tracks are better than others, but overall it's pretty dope. The respect that we all have for old-school Wu-Tang stuff is definitely deep, so the fact that somebody kinda put us together and recognized the Staten Island connection and all that s--- is pretty cool."

Tankel went on to discuss the Wu's influence, explaining that the RZA's dirty production sound made an indelible impression on many of the Daptone family members, inspiring them to dig deeper and discover the sampled sources of his dark, dusty beats.

"The grittiness is definitely an ethos that we share, but also the actual songs that RZA was sampling when he made those tracks are things that we listened to as well," Tankel says. "The darkness of their sound and the musical trackbeds that they came up with, in terms of like production esthetic, that old-school RZA, we love that -- for Budos definitely, and even crossing into some of Menahan Street Band stuff that [guitarist] Tom Brenneck does a lot of. Yesterday I saw him and he had 'The Tao of Wu' in his pocket, so the RZA influences us in a lot of different ways."

Produced by Tekst, a producer/engineer who has worked with members of Wu-Tang and its extended family, the 'Wudos Band' album was released on Dec. 14 and can be downloaded for free here.