Iconoclastic Virginia soul man Swamp Dogg has always been something of an artist out of time. When the loose limbed, fractured rhythms of funk were overtaking black American music, Swamp Dogg was using down-home Southern Soul as a vehicle for political statements every bit as impassioned, and certainly more explicitly radical, than those being made by his more famous contemporaries. The slow-rolling musical backing that Swamp Dogg chose for tracks like “We Need a Revolution” might have seemd anachronistic to most audiences as the disco era dawned, but today the music on the two albums collected on this, the third volume of Swamp Dogg’s comprehensive Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg series, sounds shockingly vital. This album collects Swamp Dogg’s mid ‘70s records Have You Heard This Story? and I Called For A Rope But They Threw Me A Rock. They are lyrically fierce and musically robust, and compare favorably with the very best of Swamp Dogg’s work.