The Numero Group’s latest piece of soul archaeology is this soundtrack for a blaxploitation movie that ran out of money before shooting started. Guitarist Carl Wolfolk was commissioned to record the soundtrack and he cut it with a Chicago vocal group, the Final Solution.

The strength of the blaxploitation film (and by extension, its soundtrack) is the way it evokes an urban yearning for a better world and a nagging sense of the hard realities. Only “Theme from Brotherman” captures that and has an individual signature—Wolfolk’s strummy guitar style. It and “No Place to Run” are the only instrumentals, and both go on too long, though they’re obviously recorded to be cut into scenes as incidental music.

As often happens with Numero releases, the album documents a cool, weird corner of the R&B world, but it reminds you what’s so good about the artists’ more acclaimed contemporaries. Wolfolk’s imagination isn’t terribly cinematic, unlike Isaac Hayes and Willie Hutch, so the songs and sequence lack drama. As such, Brotherman feels more like a collection of soul tunes from 1975, some of which catch while some don’t.