If the Replacements had been raised on the Ohio Players and James Brown instead of Alice Cooper and Aerosmith, they might have sounded something like the Royal Crescent Mob. The preeminent white funk band in the state of Ohio, the Mob is one of rock's best-kept secrets.

The band's live shows – in which lead singer David Ellison sings in a Paul Westerberg rasp and blows country-blues harp over the scratchy lines of guitarist B and the fatback beats of the Harold Chichester-Carlton Smith rhythm section – are some of the most exciting around. Both live and on its 1987 Celluloid debut album, Omerta, the Mob has achieved that rare combination of rambunctiousness and cohesion, both on originals and on tasty covers of James Brown's "Payback" and the Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster."

Omerta amply captured the Mob's onstage kerrang, but Spin the World does that album one better. The band's essence is effortless funk, and tracks like the turbo-driven "Hungry" and "Nanana" and the funky strut "Silver Street" are quintessential Mob. But with producers Richard Gottehrer and Eric Calvi cleaning up and sharpening the band's edges, the Mob has expanded its guitar-raunch base for the lumbering anti-big-business number "Corporation Enema" and gotten all bluesy and sleazy for "Goin to the Hospital."

Spin the World doesn't contain anything quite as incendiary as Omerta's "Mob's Revenge," a blazing slab of funk metal about everyday frustrations featuring the recurring chant "You're fucked!" But who else could attempt – and pull off – the "white rap meets James Brown" sound of "Big Show," on the new album, which details the time Ellison's mother saw the Beatles? The Mob's publishing company may be called Dull White Roar Music, but this band is anything but dull. (RS 559)

DAVID BROWNE