If funk were a kitchen, Lettuce would be the crew that sharpens the knives before you even sit down. "Cook" doesn’t arrive with revolutionary intent, nor does it pretend to reinvent the stove. Instead, it does something rarer and arguably harder in 2025: it sounds confident. Not loud-about-it confident, but the quiet assurance of musicians who know exactly when to add salt and when to let the groove simmer.

Lettuce have been together long enough for telepathy to replace rehearsal-room debate, and that longevity is all over "Cook". The sextet - born, famously, at Berklee - have always treated funk as a living organism rather than a museum piece. Here, the lineage is explicit but never stiff. James Brown’s ghost nods approvingly, Tower of Power’s horn discipline looms large, and yet the band never sinks into tribute-band inertia. This is funk as practice, not reenactment.

Tracks like "Clav It Your Way" and "7 Tribes" lean hard into rhythmic elasticity: Deitch’s drumming snaps and breathes, Coomes’ bass moves with the calm authority of someone who knows the floor won’t give way, and the horn section cuts with precision rather than brute force. The sound is thick but not crowded - three-dimensional, as the band themselves suggest - where every element knows its role and enjoys it.

The album’s pacing is clever without being showy. The brief "Sesshins" interludes function less as skits and more as palate cleansers, resetting the ear before the next full-bodied course. When Lettuce slow things down, as on "Breathe" or "Ghosts of Yest", they resist sentimentality. These tracks don’t melt; they hover. Nigel Hall’s vocals glide rather than plead, and the keys shimmer with restraint, proving that funk doesn’t need to sweat constantly to remain physical.

Covering Keni Burke’s "Rising to the Top" is a risky move - sacred territory for groove aficionados - but Lettuce approach it with respect and just enough swagger to justify the attempt. Elsewhere, "Keep On", co-written with Emilio Castillo, wears its message plainly, almost stubbornly so. In an era obsessed with irony, there’s something faintly rebellious about a song that just tells you to persist and means it.

What "Cook" ultimately reveals is a band thinking beyond records as isolated objects. The wine, the recipe book, the scholarship initiative - these could feel gimmicky in other hands. Here, they read as extensions of a philosophy: music as something shared, embodied, and passed on. You don’t just listen to Lettuce; you gather around them.

Is "Cook" radical? No. Is it necessary? Probably more than we admit. It’s an album that trusts groove as a form of knowledge, repetition as refinement, and pleasure as something worth taking seriously. Lettuce aren’t chasing the future or embalming the past. They’re doing what seasoned cooks do best: feeding people well, night after night, and making it look easy.