Yer Mam!'s Guide To Essential Summer Listening Part IV: The Compilations

I've been meaning to write something about this for an absolute age. As usual, the Cosmic Disco lot beat me to it - and offered forth more insight and information than I ever could - but I thought I could still chip my two penn'orth in now that it's actually available in the shops.

Anyway, Disco Italia: Essential Italo Disco Classics 1977-1985, to give its full title is the latest in Strut's hot streak and it's arguably the best yet. This isn't Italo music in the high energy, synth-powered way that you might think (for the most part, at least), but Italian disco music in the sense that it adds a distinctly Eastern Mediterranean flavour to the hedonistic disco sounds that were emanating from New York around the late-70s. In all, there are more strings, horns and live percussion here than synths (although Kano's superb 'Now Baby Now' more than takes care of the latter), replete, of course, with charmingly cod-English vox.

As I said, the Cosmic Disco boys offer more than enough colour and historical context than I could, so let me just point you in the way of some of the compilation's highlights. Red Dragon Band's 'Let Me Be Your Radio (Part 1)', with its feather-headed shouted vocals and clattering drums is a favourite, as is Kasso's classic 'Brazilian Dancer' (robbed nearly wholesale a couple of years back by Manhead for their 'Birth School Work Death' single). Kasso's Claudio Simonetti pops up again with Easy Going and their sex-funk groover, 'Do It Again'. Best of the bunch is the peerless ersatz Chic-ery of Firefly's 'Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side)', which with its NY attitude and reverb-soaked chorus vocal would have fit like a glove onto Murphy and Mahoney's recent Fabriclive mix.

I'm at risk of becoming a bit of a Strut Records cheerleader but as they seem to be improving with every release (Grandmaster Flash retrospective to come!), then I'm happy to keep on carrying the Strut banner for now. Viva Strut!

Firefly - Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side) (mp3)

Kasso - Brazilian Dancer (DJ Version) (mp3)

Red Dragon Band - Let Me Be Your Radio (Part 1) (mp3)

Tribute albums are fraught with the massive stumbling blocks of over-reverence and pointlessness, so it was with some trepidation that I approached Life Beyond Mars: Bowie Classics Reworked. Brought to us from the same people that compiled the Radiohead tribute album a couple of years ago, Exit Music, Life Beyond Mars is a hodge-podge of intrigue, failure and unalloyed triumph that frustrates and dazzles often at the same time.

One thing that Life Beyond Mars has going for it is a marvellously eclectic bunch of cover artists. The list here includes such names as Joakim, Matthew Dear, Carl Craig, Kelley Polar and The Emperor Machine amongst others. Also, their choices run pretty much the whole gamut of Bowie's career (minus the early folky stuff), or as much of his career as you can cover in twelve songs at least. So we get overly faithful run-throughs of 'Sound And Vision' (Matthew Dear) and 'Golden Years' (Susumu Yokota), alongside dull takes on 'Oh! You Pretty Things' (Au Revoir Simone) and 'Be My Wife' (Richard Walters & Faultline).

It's where the coverers add something of their own personality into the mix that Life Beyond Mars excels though. The Emperor Machine turn 'Repetition' from Lodger into, well, an Emperor Machine song (in a good way though). Joakim & The Disco's version of 'A New Career In A New Town' gives the song a veneer of grotty, tech-y disco (natch). Then there's Kelley Polar's 'Magic Dance', from the soundtrack to Labyrinth. It's totally head-wrong, bizarre and brilliant and is the best thing here by a million miles. So much better, in fact, that it just highlights how good this compilation could have been had the rest of the artists had the balls and psychosis to really go for it in the same way Polar has.

Not a total failure then as the inherent curiosity of hearing modern electronic acts take on one of their major influences pulls you through for the most part, but it's only Polar's contribution that will linger on after the curiosity value has waned.

Kelley Polar - Magic Dance (Harold And Baby O In Italy Version) (mp3)

Matthew Dear - Sound And Vision (mp3)

And now to a remix album so we have all bases covered. Delicious Vinyl, the eminent hip-hop label, decided that the best way to celebrate 20 years in the game was to hand over some of the best tracks from their back catalogue to some hot new remixers (although the words hot and new don't really apply to any of these, especially in the cases of Peaches (!) and Eminem (!!!)).

As with all remix albums, it's pretty difficult to see the point in this, especially when you consider the quality of some of the re-takes here. Peaches' interpretation of Tone Loc's 'Wild Thing' sounds exactly like you'd expect a Peaches remix of 'Wild Thing' to sound like and is therefore rubbish, Aaron Lacrate & Debonair Samir's lazy-as-fuck, B-more-by-numbers rerub of Young MC's 'Know How' is also completely uninspired and Mr Flash's, tres Ed Banger mix of Masta Ace's 'Sittin' On Chrome' is both terrible and doesn't fit the source material in the slightest. God knows what he was thinking.

It's not all bad though, as there are some real diamonds in the rough. Hot Chip turn Pharcyde's 'Passin' Me By' into a downbeat electrosoul hymnal, while Cory Nitta turns in two fabulous reworks under both his Pink Energy and Philippians guises for Brand New Heavies' 'Never Stop' (didn't even realise Delicious put this one out) and Pharcyde's 'Runnin'' respectively. Also Breakbox's inventive summery version of Fatlip's 'What's Up Fatlip?' is one for the coming months. Not too shabby then, if you skip past the dross.

The Brand New Heavies - Never Stop (Pink Energy Rmx) (mp3)

The Pharcyde - Passin' Me By (Hot Chip Rmx) (mp3)

Back later with some dates for your diary this week,

Laters,

JMx

D-I-S-C-Oh lordy, has it really been that long?!

That's right, I'm back, after a well-deserved (I think) breather, with some recommendations for your ears. Looks like I'm well into my disco at the moment, like...


Masterminded by Scottish disco, erm, mastermind, Al Kent, The Million Dollar Orchestra are a reaction to the current trends towards re-editing, sampling and all things recycled. Kent recruited some seriously talented musicians (remember them) and got them to play some furious old school funky disco jams like their lives depended on it. The resulting album, Better Days is a heady, nostalgic dip into pure disco, except that it's only the spirit that's been revived as all the sounds you're hearing are brand new.

Better Days is all about the horny horns, fleet-footed percussion and, above all else, sweaty hedonistic good times associated with '70s disco. It eschews conventional song structure in favour of creating dancefloor groovers, with hooks to spare. There's no verse-chorus-verse here, it's all very much in the vein of original '70s heads like LTD or Positive Force, with tons of four-to-the-floor beats, chicken scratch guitar and lascivious synths that bring to mind the likes of Class Action's classic 'Weekend' or early-80s boogie peddlers like D-Train, Patrice Rushen or Brenda Taylor and the functional, matter-of-fact style track titles like, 'Feel The Music', 'Dontcha Wanna Get Down' and 'Get It Boy' further enhance the fact that this is music for dancing, pure and simple.

Which doesn't mean that it doesn't lend itself equally well to headphones as there's an effervescence about Better Days that makes it great walking music. Just don't complain to Mr. Kent if you get stopped for strutting with intent to get down.

The Million Dollar Orchestra - Feel The Music (mp3)

For comparison's sake...

Class Action - Weekend (mp3)


Using the medium of disco to different ends than The Million Dollar Orchestra is arty ponce, Kelley Polar. Well, I say "arty ponce", but what I really mean is "refined electronic music genius", as his second album, I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling makes good on the promise of chamber-disco debut, Love Songs Of The Hanging Gardens (likes his ostentatious titles, this fella), which was pretty great itself. I Need You To Hold On... is a fuller, more confident, richer record, if a little less focused.

Whereas its predecessor stuck closely to a kind of patented orchestral disco-pop, the follow-up takes in some proggier elements (the multi-textured synth symphony of 'A Dream In Three Parts (On Themes By Enesco)' and the Mercury Rev-esque 'Zeno Of Elea' spring to mind), whilst also finding room for some sharp, immediate pop moments, like the he said/she said duet of 'Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City)' (fondness for parentheses too) and, best of all, the shimmering 'Sea Of Sine Waves'. It's way too early to say shit like what I'm about to - doubly so given the task I'm still suffering from lethargy because of - but if this isn't there or thereabouts in my year-end lists come December then it'll have to be one hell of a year. Not perfection, although it seems we are to expect that from Polar one day, but it's damn close.

Kelley Polar - Sea Of Sine Waves (mp3)


No post on disco music would be complete without a look into its past. It's timely then that Strut records gets back off the ground with another in its series of digs into the weirder end of the disco spectrum. Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro And Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986 is, torturous title aside, quite a fun listen. It seems that compiler Bill Brewster has hedged his bets a little with that broad title as some of these tracks wouldn't know disco if it bit them on the balls (quite what Vivien Goldman's 'Launderette' is doing on here is anyone's guess, great song as it is), but then again, I guess that's what the Not infers.

Some of the tracks here suffer from over-familiarity (do we really need to hear 'Mind Your Own Business' and 'Contort Yourself' again?), but things get more interesting when the compilation heads down the esoteric early electronica route, with tracks like Yellow Magic Orchestra's effervescent 'Seoul Music' or the bionic throb of 'Los Ninos Del Parque' by Liaisons Dangereuses and bonus points added for throwing in the instrumental of 'Sharevari'. Granted, the vocal version might be better, but surely everyone has that by now, right? Either way, it's nice to have a label like Strut back. Look out for the forthcoming Compass Point chronicle, Funky Nassau, too.

Vivien Goldman - Launderette (mp3)

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Seoul Music (mp3)


I'm adoring this thing too at the moment but I'm reviewing it for someone else, so I'll save my words for now. In the meantime, nick a treat before EMI tell me to take it down...

Hercules And Love Affair - This Is My Love (mp3)


In case you think I've been doing sod-all during my break, think again, then go and download the two recent Blog Fresh Radio shows I've contributed to. One where I'm talking about Cadence Weapon and another where I'm yammering about your man, Kelley Polar. Also, keep an eye out for some mixtapes coming soon. No word of a lie, it's gonna be boss!