Arguably the roughest, grittiest album ever to appear on Henry Stone and Willie Clarke’s Miami-based Cat imprint, James Knight & The Butlers' Black Knight is a ferocious slice of heavy funk that owes more to the freaked-out psychedelia of early Funkadelic than the languid hedonism of the early-'70s Miami scene. The album opens with “Funky Cat,” a deeply weird, Latin-inflected organ-and-guitar vamp punctuated by Knight’s laid-back interjections and oddball cat noises. The tight instrumental groove and unapologetic strangeness of “Funky Cat” effectively sets the tone for the rest of Black Knight. Knight’s run-through of Aretha Franklin’s anthemic “Save Me” is by far the wildest interpretation of this classic song to appear on record, while the relatively straightforward funk of “Fantasy World” is abruptly derailed by Knight's screaming guitar solo, which splits the difference between The Troggs' primitivism and Jimi Hendrix's bravura showmanship. A truly wonderful record, Black Knight pinpoints the moment when the unrestrained wildness of the psychedelic movement began to infiltrate the airtight rhythms of Miami soul.