Like their brethren in the Make Up, these fonky honkies from the Chocolate City of Washington, D.C., want to shake up R&B by treating it like the music they grew up with: punk rock. Unlike those rascally rebels in the Make Up, though, Delta 72 don't want you to join a revolutionary party, per se, they just want you to party like it's ... well, um, you get the point.

Most important, their reference point for R&B isn't Bobby Brown as much as it's James Brown. This four-piece bass/drums/guitar/organ combo would rather get down and dirty than be nice and smooth, and — to paraphrase Ol' Dirty Bastard — they like it raw.

From the opening fuzzed-out, vintage-1969-Detroit-rock guitar riff that begins "Are You Ready?" (RealAudio excerpt) (which is more an in-your-face demand than a question), the message comes through loud and clear. The drums lay the foundation, the bass provides the pulse and the washes of Hammond organ fill out the rest of the frenzied noise. Gregg Foreman's voice snaps with energy, and his searing guitar crackles and pops with a sound that would make old Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton feel like a proud father. When the female background singers rise above the din with the chorus, "Are you ready?/ Do you feel this?/ Are you ready?/ Do you hear this?," only the biggest stick in the mud would answer no. And as the backing vocalists take that midnight train to Georgia with their ooh-oohs, Foreman lets out a few orgasmic sounds of his own.

While the members of Delta 72 are well into their 20s, they sound like a bunch of spazzy, Ritalin-addicted 12-year-olds trying to imitate the Stones, ending up more like Funkadelic on speed and, despite their age and lack of musical training, sounding tight. Nowhere is this more evident than on "3 Day Packet Plan" (RealAudio excerpt), an uptempo romp that perfectly merges their white-noise backgrounds with the black magic that is created when the bottom is heavy and the beat swaggers with assurance.

Sure, Delta 72 could be accused of playing minstrel-rock, but there is no doubt that their love and commitment to black music is sincere, and there isn't a trace of irony in this recording. And if their imitations occasionally seem like a stretch, just remember how many times over we've forgiven Mick Jagger for trying to sound like a Southern black man.