If somebody played you “Stake Your Claim,” the perfectly titled opening cut on Eli “Paperboy” Reed’s new album Roll With You without any context, and you heard a gritty voiced singer testifying in front of a pile-driving rhythm section and a bodaciously wailing horn section, you’d automatically assume this steamy soul stew was cut in Memphis or Muscle Shoals 40 years ago. There’s no way it could be the work of a 24-year-old, baby-faced Jewish kid from Boston and his equally young and white seven-piece soul revue, the True Loves, could it? But then, you probably had the same reaction the first time you heard the uncannily soulful English singer Amy Winehouse fronting Brooklyn funkateers the Dap-Kings last year, or more recently, when encountering by chance the 21-year-old Welsh newcomer Duffy riding the “Gimme Some Lovin’”-style groove of her song “Mercy.”

If Winehouse opened the door, Reed and his finger-lickin’-good combo kick it wide open, channeling their collective obsessiveness of southern soul into a stunningly nuanced statement of identity that’s way too immediate to come off as secondhand. Not only have they gotten everything right, down to the last behind-the-beat snare hit and Memphis Horns flourish, they’ve also managed to fully inhabit soul cosmology as if they’d been born to it. This is balls-to-the-wall genre music, with no apologies. And why not? As genres go, this one ain’t chopped liver.