Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation

Radio Retaliation is the record where Thievery Corporation stopped being a lounge act with good taste in samples and became an openly political band. Released in 2008, the Washington DC duo's fifth album was their most globally sourced and most pointed, and it earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package.

Rob Garza and Eric Hilton built the album around live players and international collaborators rather than crate digging. Anoushka Shankar's sitar drives "Mandala." Seu Jorge sings "Hare Krisna" in Portuguese. Femi Kuti turns "Vampires" into an Afrobeat protest, Verny Varela handles "El Pueblo Unido," and go-go legend Chuck Brown shows up on "The Numbers Game." Sleepy Wonder fronts the title track and "Sound the Alarm," and LouLou Ghelichkhani brings the dub soaked cool of "Sweet Tides" and "La Femme Parallel."

Sixteen tracks that move from Brazil to Nigeria to Jamaica to DC without ever feeling like a tourism brochure. It remains the most ambitious thing in the ESL catalog and the album most Thievery fans reach for first.

This 2LP reissue spreads the full album across four sides. Long out of print on vinyl and worth having on the format it was built for.