The James Hunter Six, The Relatives

[THE FUNKY GOSPEL] While headliner James Hunter's blue-eyed take on Sam Cooke balances precariously between genuinely pleasant and Starbucks bland—Minute by Minute, his first record in five years, leans toward the former—opener the Relatives heaps praise on the Lord with the same raw-throated joy Cooke employed for his electric live performances. Of course, Cooke didn't live long enough to discover psychedelic guitars. The Dallas-based gospel-funk vocal quintet, however, came of age in the era of Hendrix, and in its 1970s heyday used blistering six-string pyrotechnics and guttural James Brown howls to communicate the word of God. After a 30-year break, during which founding brothers Gean and Tommy West started their own parishes, the group reconvened for the utterly smoldering The Electric Word, an album that hardly seems the product of singers who haven't worked in the pop arena for decades. Imagine Funkadelic as a church band—if that doesn't convert the hopeless sinner, nothing will.