Let’s go ahead and get the namedropping out of the way right off the bat, because yes, Black Joe Lewis makes music that will remind you of James Brown and Otis Redding and Howlin’ Wolf, sometimes in turn and sometimes all at once, but if your thoughts linger on any one of those names for longer than a couple of seconds, you’re missing the point. Helluva loss, too. There are plenty of revivalists out there, carefully staging sonic re-enactments of the 1960s and ’70s soul and funk scenes, but Lewis is no revivalist; he’s a true raver, and his new LP Scandalous is the righteous blast of metallic soul and dirty funk shot through with punk mayhem and gospel spirit that the genre has so desperately needed.

Scandalous is an outing with his Honeybears, who rock and roll like a standard four-piece, only they happen to have a quartet of horn players blaring behind them at all times. Jim Eno, the drummer for Spoon, once again produces, and if anything he’s stripped things even closer to the bone than on their first meet-up, Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is! This album manages to stick to the same basic template while ratcheting everything up a few notches, most notably the sheer, vulgar energy of the thing.

Eno locks this music right into the rhythm itself, just as he does in the best Spoon songs, and he does it by cutting things even closer to the bone than before. The last album had eight horn players, and that number is cut in half here, but sometimes things are even more stripped-down. “Messin’” is as simple a vamp as you’ll ever hear, hypnotic acoustic guitar chords and a rhythm section that’s mostly just one tambourine. Yes, it could have been a Howlin’ Wolf song.

But Eno’s production work is only ever going to be as good as the songs themselves — after all, he’s stripped away all the excess, so what else is left? — and Lewis delivers in a big way here. He calls the album Scandalous, which fits the spirit of the thing pretty well, but actually there’s nothing too shocking about it. He’s working off of a pretty solid and well-trod foundation of retro funk and soul music, with lyrics that are gleefully bawdy in a pulpy, B-movie kind of way. “Mustang Ranch” is a song about a brothel, and a lot of the rest of the material deals in violence, cheatin’ women, coke binges; then Saturday night mayhem comes crashing into Sunday morning reverie on the last song, “Jesus Took My Hand.”

You may not go for all that kind of stuff, though I would suggest that if you’re taking these lyrics too seriously you’re missing the point. For all its randy depravity, this is awfully fun music, and it works because it’s given grit and gravity by the weight of history. Notice that the sing-along chant “Booty City” is an unpretentious sex song that could have come from the pen of anyone from James Brown to Prince, and that “You Been Lyin,’” with vocal group the Relatives in tow, blurs the line between gospel and blues. Even more than that, though, this stuff lives in the blood, sweat and tears of the performances: Opener “Livin’ in the Jungle” mixes molten-lava funk-rock with pure Stax horns, but the real blueprint is in “She’s So Scandalous,” which simply locks into a groove that’s pure nastiness, and rides it hard, until the whole thing just blows apart.