Snarky Puppy have been searching for a purpose for their albums. Despite their most recent LPs, Family Dinner Volume Two with its collaborations from Jacob Collier to David Crosby, and Sylva, with the Metropole Orkest, winning them Grammys, both sought new recorded contexts for what is fundamentally a road band, maybe the most successful and hardest gigging in jazz today. Culcha Vulcha is billed as Snarky Puppy’s first ‘proper’ studio album in eight years. Otherwise tending to record live, time was taken in their native Texas to get things right. ‘Grown Folks’ shows lead arranger Michael League’s intricate care with what is effectively a multi-cultural jazz-funk big band. Dirty squalls of electric guitar merge into squelching Moog synths recalling 1970s Stevie Wonder, the brass section stand up as if under Ellington, trumpet and percussion take sides on the stereo spectrum, and atmospheric keyboards help build a climactic riff. ‘Gemini’ is the least typical and most affecting track here, all electric piano and guitar, sultry drift and melancholy; ‘Beep Box’’s tablas and smeared synths provide another atmospheric miniature. ‘Palermo’ draws heavily on the band’s Texan church chops, its organ solos layered over bubbling African percussion which also hints at New Orleans marching bands. Typically for their jazz-funk end of fusion, they’re sexless, even anaemic compared to funk at its most soulful. The interweaving rhythms of the closing, nine-minute ‘Jefe’ are the real heart of a band happiest building towers of groove in their natural, stage home.