What is and isn't "uk funky"? What's in and what's out? It's a sign of the genre's weakness for some that this isn't an easy question to answer. I hope I'm not merely being contrarian when I claim it as a key strength: for a music with such a strong sense of identity, it's like uk funky has an inbuilt resistance to being determined by any one quality (musical or social), as if by doing so it can avoid being pinned down, reductively defined and so reduced in possibility. You know a track is "uk funky" in the same way that a judgment of physical hotness is like the square root of the entire interrelationship between a person's appearance, swagger, accent, the heat outside, how long it's been since you've gotten some, not to mention your most private odd desires and fantasies. It's never clear what the key factor is, if there even is one.
The task of saying what uk funky is generally can be approached only obliquely, by exposing the shortcomings of each attempt to hypostasize it, to anchor it to some concept which can provide both definition and a means of judgment. And I do tend to react a bit over-zealously when I see audiences acting like uk funky (or, rather, "good" uk funky) is about one or two qualities in particular. There are dubstep partisans who praise deepness and moody atmospheres, grime refugees looking for MCs, velocity and metallic sonics, pop fans who seem to think the noblest endeavour of a funky tune is to transcend its genre base and aspire to the timeless combination of good tune + catchy chorus + memorable (female) vocal. None of these positions are wrong per se - there are fabulous tracks that work wonders while inhabiting each of these equations almost solely - but for the scene itself they can only ever be the smallest fraction of what's right.
The desire to establish a story within a story - to say that, as far as you care, (good) funky is about (insert your niche here) and the rest can be ignored - is fine as far as it goes, but I can't help but feel sorry for the people who approach it this way. In the same way that I feel sorry for people who love Zed Bias but can't get with "Flowers" (or vice versa!), or people who can wax lyrical about No-U-Turn but can't stand Aphrodite (or... but you get the idea). Surprise surprise, funky is exciting as a "scene" when it's trending furthest from such partial visions: when "In The Morning" rubs shoulders with "Seasons" and both learn something from one another. Think of it like a giant single pool of water, where each ripple ultimately spreads out and rebounds across the entire surface: as well as being factually correct by and large, this is what we should want funky to be, because this is the model with the most possibility, wherein populism and abstraction, tough grooves and sweet vocals can all swap tricks and share their stories.
Pearson Sound is a pseudonym for Ramadanman, one of my favourite dubstep producers - he made last year's "Blimey", which was deeply reminiscent of primo Metalheadz, or perhaps more specifically Photek's "The Rain" meets Roni Size's "Timestretch" meets 1994 era Dillinja. "Wad" has just been released on Hessle Audio, probably the best dubstep label in my untrustworthy opinion, but "Wad" is, on any sensible reading, a funky track. Certainly, "Wad" is a rhythmically dense as funky comes: an almost overwhelming ensemble of sycopated door slam kicks, tense snare attacks and opulent latin percussion latticework. As such it bears some of the hallmarks you might expect of a dubstep producer going funky: at once spare and cluttered, the track suggests that what gets Ramadanman excited is the rhythmic possibilities of funky, while perhaps less so its songs or its roots in house. But "Wad" is far too cheesy to really profit in any traditional or expected fashion from such dubstep associations, its one-note birdcall samples and general friskiness suggesting nothing so much as someone dropping an E at a salsa class. Tellingly, one sceptic complained on youtube: "is this part of the Zumba dance fitness craze cd?". I like that "Wad" sounds too enthused and hyper to ever stop and worry about sounding classy. But Ramadanman has hardly abandoned all the production nuances that characterise his dubstep material. Check the tune's amazing "chorus", which consists of those door-slam beats threading themselves through an immaculate cut-up vocal singing something like "Work! Hi'tm dat dat, si dah! Der! Work! Hi'tm dat ooh si dah! People Work!" and so on, before pausing for a bonetrembling bass drop, only to deliver you safely back at latin central. It's the dynamism of its construction, rather than just its awesome springloaded groove or head-circling vocal hook or even pungent corniness, that makes "Wad" stay with you.
Soule Power is in fact Scratcha DVA, one of funky's most unpredictable producers. Dude's got a history as a grime producer, but he's also behind the sassy broken beat house anthem "I'm Leaving" (should appeal to fans of "In The Morning"), and he seems to take funky's roots in house very seriously (see his clanking, pounding refix of "God Made Me Phunky"), while his dj sets have a heavy electro-house tilt to them. "Natty Dub", meanwhile, has been picked up by Hyperdub, and it's not hard to see why: alongside Roska's work as "Uncle Bakongo", this is as spare and as self-consciously "avant" as funky gets, its waterlogged tribal beats sounding rather like a lethargic, multilayered instrumental dub of "Get Ur Freak On", while its loping "halfstep" kickdrums probably will win over dubstep fans straightaway. At the same time, "Natty Dub" has a grime style flip-flop structure, with every second set of four bars featuring a counter-rhythm that sounds like a car failing to start. As with a lot of Cooly G productions, the effect is a kind of emotionless intensity, where you lock into the circular, cyclical iterations of the groove. Again, a dubstep kind of vibe. Ironically, given that Hyperdub sponsorship equals instant auteurist fetishism, this stuff tends only to properly come alive in the mix, where it provides compelling bridges between more traditional house "build" tracks or the more blunt, ravey or sing-songy attractions of other uk funky. Cooly G in particular has an excellent ear for picking "deep" US or Euro house tracks whose scintillating percussion arrangements gel well both with her own tracks particularly and uk funky generally; in her sets, tunes like "Natty Dub" and Uncle Bakongo's stiff tribal assault "Bambara" are like moments when the house groove, always stretched to the limits, is now caught or snagged, snarled in some syncopated thicket. Think of "Natty Dub" less as a tune in its own right and more as a wickedly effective uk funky dj tool and its appeal becomes obvious immediately. I probably wouldn't listen to the tune by itself, but then, that's what DJ Naughty's "Love Lockdown" is for (not to mention a million others).
On ILX last year the very cluey Siegbran asked what made uk funky so different from the "Spanish house" scene typified by dj Vato Gonzales, who I think is actually dutch (go figure). Listen to Gonzales' sets and the similarities are clear though not conclusive: it's like this scene has taken a slightly different set of signifiers (Fedde Le Grand style "funky" electro-house, Pitbull) and started edging into the same space of raucous, syncopated, distinctly "urban" sounding house music. In what feels like a weird karmic reaction, uk funky has answered Siegbran's question by adopting Gonzales' "Badman Riddim" as its very own. At least a year old now, "Badman Riddim" would be a strange beast of a track in any context: stiff beats, massive seismic bass reminiscent of the best Metope or Basteroid tracks on Areal Records, forbidding string riffs, and then a monstrously overblown horn breakdown worthy of '94 era jungle, over which a voice announces portentously, "Right about now! Badman riddim! Inside the place! Place! Place! Place!" Rather like the Seeed crew from Germany, this faux-patois sounds halfway convincing if you're not paying attention, but of course once you focus the accent sharpens into something all too Euro. I suspect that those horns are sampled from Pharaoh Monche's "Simon Says", and indeed "Badman Riddim" shares that same bludgeoning so-thuggish-it's-funky vibe, that same macho aggression that trips right over into high camp. I also imagine that its breakdown goes off like a bomb in a club setting.
How can UK funky hold its head up high when a track like this becomes an anthem? But surely, "Badman Riddim" is only continuing what "Doom's Night" started: if a track is banging in any genre, it's banging in any genre. And this is the secret appeal of UK Funky's openness, its fuzziness, its lack of firm (or any) borders: it provides a context of greatness in which the appeal of outsider music can flourish, and anything that this music lets in automatically sounds better than it did before. Once you get in, who'd want out?
Most "skank" tracks don't really survive the transition from homemade youtube craze to proper crossover phenomenon. Fr3e's "Tribal Skank (Skank Calm Down)" being a case in point - when it was the soundtrack to a dozen amateur dance-offs it seemed like the best thing ever, but the eventual slick pro video clip immediately transformed it from gimmick-good to gimmick-bad, and it's hard now to hear it with the same enthusiasm and fondness I once held (the annoying extra vocals didn't help, admittedly). Why does "Stick Up" work in the opposite fashion? Well maybe it's because the video is just awesome, a weird and unexpectedly successful melange of high-tech alien futurism, high street humour and dance instruction class. Such a triumph of little details: the girls dancing in the shiny tops with the overexposed lights streaking across them is maybe my favourite music video visual this year.
Its glittery video also helps "Stick Up" pass some credibility test that I didn't even think I believed in. Skank tracks - with their basic "nursery grime" chants and rudimentary or outright pirated grooves - attract all the kinds of criticism you would expect: made in 2 minutes, no soul no feeling, blah blah blah. I don't truck with this, but nonetheless it's difficult not to feel like their cheery populism is slightly wasted when the tunes are too literally cheap to appeal to a pop audience weaned on high-tech production values and glamorous photo shoots. "Stick Up" as a tune could go both ways. On the one hand, with a homemade dance routine video it sounds like a defiantly unprofessional mishmash of R&B signifiers, funky beats and the tune from Faithless' "Insomnia". Plus as near as I can tell the accompanying dance routine is rather too straightforward.
On the other, it really is impeccably produced: there's such a widescreen vibe to it, the bass when it drops is just so lugubrious and doom laden, and in this context the Faithless synth riffs sound exotic as much as anthemic (plus it's made me go back to "Insomnia" itself - better than I remember!). The mixture is kinda inspired. Funky is probably the only house-related sub-genre in which sampling "Insomnia" wouldn't sound obvious as well as corny, and where its corniness might become a strong point in the song's favour. If "Stick Up" does well in the charts (highly unlikely as that prospect may seem) it would be a vindication for that disaster-courting magpie tendency. If, as is more likely, it doesn't do well, it'll still be a glitzy and glamourous minor classic in my book. Plus how cool is it that Dotstar looks a lot like Green Velvet at times.
Even leaving aside that it's produced by Fingaprint's production partner, it shouldn't surprise that "Domino Effect" feels like a sister track to "Everybody": with its sexy female vocal and slithery synth melodies it ventures into similar territory of slick electroid vocal house. Marvelously so. Less rhythmically dense than "Everybody", "Domino Effect" is nonetheless the better of the two, its shimmering synth chords and lethargic, spacey groove creating a totally otherworldly vibe, especially when emerging from other funky tunes in the mix.
In contrast to "Everybody", the groove here is deceptively simple, a spare but gorgeously textured drum pattern pivoting fitfully around a single note bass boom, while overhead a succession of increasingly frail but springy and moist keyboard vamps bounce and twirl. Hardly bothering to differentiate itself from a straight 4X4 groove, nonetheless the track's rhythm sounds thoroughly distinct and memorable; I often find it circling around my head. In this, and in the tune's brooding eeriness, I'm reminded of Adamski's "Killer": there's that same sense of the groove being almost pregnant and weighed down by its own unsettling portentousness.
One thing that funky does which hitherto was almost lost to history is bring back the possibility of populist vocal house where the beat itself tells a story. We are used to this in R&B and rap of course, and we are used to magnificent house-pop in all eras, but what we no longer even think to expect is house-pop with an arresting, mnemonic drum pattern that itself captures and communicates much of the vibe of the song. "Killer" had this, indeed belonged to an era when such things were expected. Of course the other place this understanding has resurfaced is in R&B itself, where the revitalised popularity of the 4X4 beat has made the better producers think harder about how to squeeze every last drop of nuance out of relatively uniform grooves. Not surprisingly, "Domino Effect" also reminds me of such voluptuous kickdrum-epics as Electrik Red's "We Fuck You". If funky ever does cross over in the way that 2-step did, it's unlikely to be with driving housey vibe of tunes like "Do You Mind" or Wookie & Ny's "Falling" (as fine as both are); conversely, I could see this kind of torpid, expressive languor working a treat.
Also I can't go past the fabulous self-diagnosing lyrics here: "Psychedelic futuristic noise is playing in the background... You had my from the very start... Now it's time that I surrender... Something in my heart.... Just went click. Click. Click...." (cue drums)
Fingaprint and the other producers in the Invasion Records crew (O.B., who together with Fingaprint forms Magic Touch, and Tadow Productions) are considered pioneers in funky, the first producers to take it dark, to take it ravey, to take it dancehall. Fingaprint's "The Takeover", with its MC Creed lick and pounding syncopated groove, is that "seminal" announcement of the new thing in the same way that More Fire Crew's "Oi" was - though curiously I don't find myself returning to it so often, perhaps because I heard and fell in love with Fuzzy Logik's similar "Twiss" first. The big one for me was Fingaprint's slamming remix of Skepta's "The Rolex Sweep", which seemed just so much harder and more muscular than any actual grime I heard last year - indicative of the odd sense of gender flux that funky represents.
Some of Fingaprint's more recent productions have sounded rather electro-housey, which I'm somewhat skeptical about as a direction for the scene, but I'm keeping an open mind. On his remix of Rudenko's "Everybody" any such resemblance is more to do with the disaffected vocal than Fingaprint's music, but still the track reveals some lessons learned: with its concentration of mid-range detail the better electro-house is (or was) characterised by a quasi-Orbital love of warp and weft, each synth line or arpeggio interlacing with the others, the tracks rising and falling in intensity as elements are added, subtracted and added again. The delectably produced "Everybody" , translates this taste for interlocking into a feast of overlaid drums: I count at least five different patterns, usually running simultaneously, each simply exquisite sounding. Funky was already an additive style in this fashion (see Seany B's "Stompa" from last year for a great and very easy-to-follow example), but the "Everybody" remix turns this approach into an artform; the interplay between the drums and the vocals is a wonder to behold.
Simon R dismissed this trend last year with the elegant epithet "percussion is the last refuge of scoundrels" (or something to that effect). It has a nice ring, but it's misleading in two senses: firstly, in that the percussion-overlay approach is only one of many in funky - an equal number of funky tunes are as spare in their construction as grime tunes - and secondly, in that as applied to funky it relies on a logic of equivalence that simply doesn't hold true. The additive tendency in funky cannot be reduced to the stereotypical depiction of polite house with live percussion on top simply because the purpose, function and effect of the percussion-overload are entirely different.
One of my favourite albums of the last few years is the More Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats compilation (if you understandably thought you would only need one funk carioca compilation in your life, I should note here that this one is far superior to its predecessor in my opinion). At the time what excited me about it was the way in which it seemed much closer to rave music (alongside the usual suspects - miami bass etc.) than to much of the populist rhythmic music of the past decade plus. It's not the similarity to rave itself that was exciting, but rather the way in which the music built grooves of sometimes mindboggling complexity and syncopated energy out of often very simple individual components combined together, while still sounding vital and jocular. This stands in stark contrast to the post-Timbaland consensus that characterises pretty much everything else: usually single loops obsessively constructed to do the most damage possible all by themselves. The point here is not that one way is better than the other, but that both options are on the table: at a time when "we" think we understand what makes all this great music just so great, that sudden sharp jab is necessary.
UK funky shares funk carioca's disinterest in (even impatience for) others' insistence on futurism, so it's not surprising that it also unconsciously resembles funk in its rhythmic approach at times (though let's be clear: it equally draws from the post-Timbaland heritage, via grime primarily; most of the time it falls somewhere in the middle). There's a certain... slickness to "Everybody" that obscures the unwitting relationship (more sympathetically: accomplishment), but nonetheless as the tune fires up to its most dense, most overblown peaks I feel that same little thrill, that same sense that here, thank God, is a music unafraid of the inherent corniness ("scoundrelness"?) of maximalism, of thinking about how rhythmic pretension might destroy the most ruthlessly unpretentious of dancefloors. But for grinches, here's a more respectable point of comparison for this track: the perfect midpoint between A Guy Called Gerald circa "Voodoo Ray" and A Guy Called Gerald circa Black Secret Technology.
Swift Jay - Revenge Hard to select my very favourite development in UK funky over the past 12 months or so, but probably top of my list is the number of tracks that sound like funky versions of ‘ardkore rave. In terms of specific sounds this usually means: bouncy piano vamps, spiraling mid-range synthesizer effects (which might otherwise be characterized as electro-house affectations) and, best of all, shrill high-pitched diva exhortations, from declamatory full-fledged phrases (“It’s the new sound!”) through enigmatic fragments (“Oh… and I’m here to tell you…!”) to isolated sighs and moans of painfully ecstatic feeling (“ey-EY-ey!”). Incidentally, the three preceding vocal snippets come from tracks I’ve yet to ID – any assistance is highly appreciated.
Based on the tracks I have been able to identify, the Funk Factory team (Scottie D and Smoovie T) are the clear masters, and I’ll be talking about them quite a bit later on. Initially I thought “Revenge” was a Funk Factory track, as it shares a similar vibe: a spare, cutting percussive groove that keeps layering on more and more rhythms, the snares slashing into your ears with an air of casual violence. Above and throughout, a big-chested Loleatta-style house diva bellows “Give yourself! Give yourself! To meeeeeee!”
There’s frequently a breathtaking superficiality to discussions about the role of masculinity and femininity in UK dance music: the characterization of jungle, grime and dubstep as masculine and 2-step, bassline and funky as feminine fails to grasp entirely anima/animus logic that defines all these styles. Notice how 2-step and grime seem to diametrically oppose and yet mirror each other on this issue. 2-step was almost always at its most thrilling when it was trying to plumb new, hitherto undiscovered depths of sexy darkness, the cyborg funk of “Destiny” giving rise to the bass explosions of “Neighbourhood” which in turn led to the tense percussive attack of London Dodgers’ “Down Down Biznizz” (i.e. just follow the line of development taken by the Locked On label between 1998 and 2001). Sure, some of 2-step’s most brilliant tracks were unashamedly sugary and “girlish” – tunes like “Flowers” and “Crazy Love” – but as a genre, what pushed garage along was the magnetic attraction between sensuality and muscularity, pop hooks and dark bass-driven grooves. Conversely, grime was almost always at its most exciting when it was trying to find its way back to the light.
People talk about funky like it’s a swing back to femininity from grime and/or dubstep. This is true only to the extent that funky harks back to garage’s particular arc of development at times. Even then, that’s only half the story: funky sounds crude or robotic as easily it does fluid, sexy and, well, funky. As with dancehall, funky’s flexible beat structure and hormone-balanced aren’t tied to any particular strategy of affect, but (especially in good DJ sets) create a sense of such questions being suspended. I suspect that this sense of suspension owes a lot to dancehall, but it’s also a hallmark of rave fully as much as are breakbeats or piano vamps or hoover riffs.
On one Marcus Nasty set I have, while “Revenge” is playing an MC expands on the diva sample: “yes, just give yourself to us, that’s all we want, just you for the night, your ears, your mind, your body, your soul!” He sums up the ambivalence of this demand for the listener’s submission, which requires a total surrender to the logic of the music. Funky had to harden up to capture this vibe; “Revenge” is a house record that samples a diva, but everything about its clipped, buzzy groove feels violent and charged with testosterone. And yet this toughening is not achieved at the expense of the diva, who remains a real, tangible force in the music. As should be obvious, what is exciting about tracks like these isn’t just their component elements, but the way in which they’re brought into constellation with one another, the imperious diva and the impossibly sharp beats egging each other on to ever greater heights.
Teedra Moses – Be Your Girl (Perempay & Dee Remix)/Aaliyah – Rock The Boat (Ill Blu Remix) You can tell a lot about a style by which R&B singers it idolizes. Garage loved its robo-divas: the unnatural poise of Aaliyah, the wounded android bleats of Brandy. Funky loves these too, but I’ve counted no less than three versions of Teedra’s “Be Your Girl”, which has to count for something. I adore Teedra too, and I’m sympathetic to what Funky sees in her: that comforting and yet distinct combination of soulful warmth and hyper-active expressiveness, only intensified by the increased BPMs here. “Sometimes I touch myself, imagining your pleasure, babyyyyy” she sighs on Perempay & Dee’s remix, and what was a subtle and lingering deployment of melisma on the final consonant becoming a fizzy sigh of alcopop-assisted excitement. Perempay & Dee’s groove – galloping but otherwise dutifully housey, pivoting around surging electro-bass riffs – is rowdy enough, but mostly it wants to get out of Teedra’s way and let her work her magic.
Ill Blu’s remix of Aaliyah’s “Rock The Boat” is an entirely different beast, its muscularisation of the original taking it somewhere more unsettled and ambivalent. Ill Blu’s favourite trick – combining 4X4 kicks with a five snare hit per bar pattern that seems to skip across the top of the groove like a stone across the surface of a pond – allows them to create grooves that are both light and yet oddly cutting, inflicting dancefloor destruction by a thousand paper cuts. Aaliyah, of course, becomes a more excitable, demanding lover than on the more languid original, but the increasingly buzzy bass and dubbed-out atmosphere suggest a desire that is more compulsive than pleasurable. Towards the end Ill Blu unleash their second favourite trick, which is to introduce an entirely new melody as the tune draws to a close just to show off; here it’s a melancholy dial tone for someone else’s number; even in the midst of it all the singer is already coordinating her next assignation.
Mos’ Wanted – Different Lekstrix One of the more irritating aspects of a lot of “hardcore continuum” crit (by which I mean a whole swathe of crit that talks about jungle/garage/grime etc. as expressing some kind of narrative) is its tendency towards literal-mindedness. Many people got quite excited when UK funky producer Mr Roach sampled LFO’s “LFO” on a tune, even though the result was kind of tepid… as if what was important was the fact that Mr Roach had heard of “LFO”. This is a kind of crit that wants the music it’s discussing to do the critical legwork; the resulting endorsement is less for the track itself than for the gesture which the track makes.
But funky is so frequently referential and reverential with respect to the past that this rather seems like a supreme non-event. Much more exciting is the way in which funky seems to suck up all the great sonic ideas in dance music and reproduce them, seemingly (or actually) unaware of what it’s doing. “Different Lekstrix” doesn’t sample an LFO tune nor go out of its way to sound like one, but it captures much of the feel of the first LFO album: that same radioactive glow, that same slippery, slithery vibe, that same post-electro fascination with bouncy syncopated grooves.
“Different Lekstrix” has kicks, but they’re buried, submerged beneath a gorgeously sickly high-pitched bassline that seems constantly to shimmer and deliquesce, while on top explosions of high-end percussion and yawning gaps give the tune a hesitant, stop-start feel, like an ancient, immensely complex machine wheezing into life. MCs love it, because the tune’s constant revolutions make their rhymes seem more rhythmically inventive than they might otherwise, while at the same time different elements of the tune – a snare here, a sharp hand clap there – prop up a kind of 4X4 awning that’s easy to ride.
Unlike 2-step, there’s no straightforward flight from the monotony of the 4X4 beat in funky. Rather, many tunes rise to diverging but symmetrical challenges: sometimes, how to make a 4X4 beat sound as fucked up as possible, but other times, how to make a fucked up beat sound as intuitive and familiar as possible. In this tune both challenges seem to come together: it’s not clear whether this ungainly groove is supposed to be familiar, or alien, or both at once.
I have heard so much – too much – UK funky that I absolutely love this year, to the point that I could name more funky tracks I love from 2009 than all the other music I love from this year combined. At this point, funky is not merely the music dearest to my heart currently, but ever: increasingly, I’m convinced that it’s the closest thing to a skeleton key for my entire enjoyment of music that I’m likely to come across.
Such revelations call for epic thinkpieces, and assuredly there will be one.
But for now, I want to share with you the funky tracks that have made my year-so-far. The plan is to talk about one hundred of them, in no particular order, though I'll probably save the best for last. Hoping you get something out of it.
Cooly G – Dis Boy Part 4 At this stage I’m only planning to talk about Cooly G once, but I probably split this three ways between “Dis Boy Part 4”, “Ya Instrumental” and “Love Dub”. “Ya Instrumental” is the disorienting track perfect for MCs, all discombobulated bass burbles, stuttering kicks and unidentifiable vocal samples like a small child being strangled. “Love Dub” is the romantic, atmospheric number, MJ Cole’s “Sincere” on mogadon (a great idea btw). “Dis Boy Part 4” falls somewhere between the two, simultaneously lugubrious and light as a feather, its strobing synth chords and restlessly sweeping hi-hat patterns evoking images of a rave in an iron lung, the e’d up vibes shrunken to a claustrophobic shell. “I know dis boy from round the way…” the singer sighs ambivalently, “he says he wants to run away…” She doesn’t sound too happy about it, and I have to say that refusing to see the joy in things is kinda Cooly’s modus operandi: all her tracks have this nervous, desiccated vibe that probably prevents me from liking her more than I do, which is somewhere between “a lot” and the slavish fanboy devotion she seems to inspire in others. If funky is so often about a kind of fierce joy in rhythmic excess, Cooly G’s vibe is pure pre-millenial tension. As a result she can occasionally come across as funky for dubstep fans (her first proper vinyl release is on Hyperdub, go figure), but if we must have such a thing it’s difficult to imagine it being done better than here.
Moony – Donnie One micro-narrative I’ve long maintained is that between them grime and dubstep missed a trick by moving too quickly past that oh-so-brief moment circa 2001-2002 that I’ve always called “midnight garage”: rolling assymetrical grooves that owe equal amounts to jungle’s breakbeat manipulations and dancehall, and a vibe that was dark as and yet still sexy in typical garage fashion, very much a “this year’s model” take on the kind of darkside sultriness that garage always did to perfection anyway. Think tunes like the Bump & Flex Dancehall Dub of Cleptomaniac’s “All I Do”, London Dodgers’ “Down Down Biznizz”, The Ends’ “Are You Really From The Ends?”, Target’s “Earthwarrior”. So much of funky’s “trackier” end has seemed like a pre-meditated attempt to please me personally by bringing this moment of possibility back to life.
Moonie’s “Donnie” is an excellent example: for what is nominally a house track, it sounds remarkably like, oh I dunno, Timbaland circa 2001/2002? I’m reminded of the production on the first Bubba Sparxx album in particular, amazing tunes like “Twerk A Little”, that same sense of… not minimalism, but focus, the single loop pummeling you and not bothering to do much more because no more is needed. But also Missy’s ‘Under Construction’ album: an under-recognised attempt to synthesise typical breakbeat loops with the most avant of production techniques. There’s really only one loop here – give or take some bongo patters in the background – but it’s simply beautiful. Funky doesn’t seem to have any specific “outer limit” in terms of what ties its rhythms back to house, but a common tactic is to have kicks on the one and the four and to let the middle of each bar do what it wants. On “Donnie” that means stabbing dancehall kicks followed by a sudden rush of snares, like the drums are being sucked into a giant, deadly rotor. Around this Moony laces eerie, wilting synth vamps and ghostly RZA-style hums and sighs; but if “Donnie” is haunted, its spirits are too busy dancing to the groove to pander to pathos-hunters.
Yet more UK funky house stunnaz for your consumption and enjoyment.
Perempay – In The Air TJ Cases – Nothing Better Than Your Love “In The Air” isn’t conservative, precisely – its beat is just too monstrous, its bass so malicious (but delicious too) – but this muscular vocal anthem nonetheless retains so much of the value of the house music that it has risen from. It’s a useful reminder that the appeal of UK funky shouldn’t be judged simply by how quickly it can run away from its origins. I love the deep, soulful vocal with its half-celebratory, half-claustrophobic catch-cry “There’s something in the air/there’s something in the air/I can feel it/I can feel it” – the resemblance to the similarly titled Phil Collins track is perhaps not coincidental!
But even considered as a “up” tune, “In The Air” is big: catchy but dreamy and vaguely disorienting all at once. It’s easy to forget that 2-step had a similar crop of tunes that caught this vibe – stuff like Chris Mac’s “Set It Off” or (of course) the Steve Gurley remix of “Spirit of the Sun”. As much as I’m enjoying the inevitable R&B-ification of vocals in funky, there’s a peculiar vibe that house divas capture on tracks like these that’s completely distinct and at times overwhelming. What is it? Maybe it’s that divas speak so eloquently for “all of us” – everyone on the dancefloor. As such there’s always a tinge of existential dread to their hysteria; a pleasure so intense you could lose your identity entirely. See also: Malice's lovely, kaleidoscopic remix of Quentin Harris' "My Joy."
I’ve said elsewhere that one of the moments in 2-step that funky reminds me of most intensely is TJ Cases’ tracks from 2001 – “One By One”, “I Like To Cut I Like To Play”, tunes with rollicking soca-beats (as per K2 Family’s “Bouncing Flow”) and cavernous deep basslines, plus TJ’s signature big-chested divas. As a kind of recap of everything that was great about 2-step from 1998 to 2001 it’s hard to think of a tune that can beat “One By One” in particular, and its dark, panic-attack pop-tronics were unsurprisingly revived in a big way for some of Davinche’s “R&G” productions like Katie Pearl’s “Mr DJ”.
So it’s hardly a surprise to see the producer return to capitalize on funky. “Nothing Better Than Your Love” is massive, albeit pretty straightforward: bouncy house beats, enormous descending bass riffs that verge on electro-house, hoarse-sounding diva exhortations. It reminds quite a bit of Fedde De Grand and Ida Corr’s big electro-house/pop crossover chart hit “Let Me Think About It”, one of the absolute best pieces of dance-pop of the past few years (don’t sleep on that one even if “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit” left you cold) – both tunes are just too joyful and fervent to deny. It seems that the litmus test for such straightforward house tunes to survive and keep abreast amongst funky’s restless pack is that they have to be… well, really fucking great, essentially.
Little Silver – Seasons; Pulse Remix JME – Terminator; Blanka Funky is coming up with all sorts of strategies for fucking with the 4X4 house beats. Foregoing soca grooves or broken beat funk, “Seasons” supplements its house pulse with a crashing snare break just before the second beat in each bar, which gives the tune a feel that is both lurching and impatient; this is syncopation designed not for dancing but against it (albeit in a way that makes you want to dance all the more compulsively – it’s like a sonic obstacle course), and the randomness of the obstruction in the groove conveys an air of senseless violence. Combine that with rattling percussion and a portentous Swizz Beats synth-horn melody, and “Seasons” resembles some sort of giant torture machine. Tunes like this are taking their cues almost entirely from grime.
Ironically, Little Silver’s actual remix of Musical Mob’s “Pulse X” is less obviously grimey, swamping the instantly identifiable bass pulse o’ doom with swathes of intricate tribal percussion. Meanwhile grime artist JME’s “Terminator” unsurprisingly fits directly into the emerging grime-house trend, sounding somewhere between early Skepta (go figure) and Lethal B’s “Pow”, gloomy horn fanfares doing battle with a chattering avalanche of tinny-sounding handclaps. But “Blanka” is something entirely different: dark but gentle, pretty but sickly, its ghostly tinkles of a melody pirouetting delicately around a squiggly, squishy, slippery drum pattern and the moodiest dread bassline since Grrove Chronicles’ “Stone Cold”.
Hard House Banton – Siren; Reign; The Music; Turn It Around Not sure what the name of this group means. “Siren” is a big tune on the scene at the moment, partly because it’s a bit of a gimmick tune – computer error chimes, police sirens etc. But it’s not “gimmick” in the sense that “I Don’t Smoke” was – its sensuous snare-heavy house groove just slots too perfectly to feel like its defining itself against the scene. More “crowdpleaser” I guess – see also Daddy Funk’s “Rough It Up” with its morse code bleeping, like a funky house version of Roman Flugel’s “Geht Nocht”. “Reign” is better than either of these though, its marvellously agile springloaded groove and melodramatic multi-tracked ghostly sighs and ringing piano chords reminding me of the brilliantly ridiculous pathos you’d get on the more emotive dancehall riddims about five years ago. “The Music” is also great, bleepy action that sounds like early LFO at a carnival. Hard House Banton aren’t defining themselves solely by their imaginative instrumental tracks, though – like just about every big producer on the scene they have at least one sexy vocal track. “Turn It Around” is serious and mysterious, with a tense bassline and cut-up and looped vocals (“turn it aroundroundroundroundroundroundround”) perfect for brainfried end of the night delirium.
Aphrodisiax – Unfinished Business Bearfoot Monk – Wearwolf Perhaps more than anything else, the attraction of funky house lies in its impossible range – tracks sounding variously like a dozen different genres but united by a still ineffable something. This is where funky house is quite distinct from that moment in 2002 which Martin Blackdown often references: that moment when “garage” meant, variously, MC tracks, breakbeat garage, “sublow” and proto-8bar, dark 4X4 grooves, the first stirrings of dubstep and the last vestiges of 2-step. But in 2002 there was actually no reigning principle across all of these directions, which is part of why the scene ultimately split in so many directions (of course, Martin probably means 2008 is like 2002 insofar as lots of people are playing dubstep, grime, funky and bassline amongst and against each other – but as scenes these all remain relatively separate I think).
In isolation, the fractured, asymmetrical beats and tinkling melodies of “Unfinished Business” resemble IDM as much as house. “Wearwolf” sounds as much like Black Dog meets jittery nu-electro as it does house, groaning under the weight of its churning bass and weird trebly percussive sounds, including what sound like cash registers being cleared. Neither track really make sense until you hear them in the mix, where their rococo excesses seems to emerge out of and then collapse back into the more familiar groove patterns of other tracks. Aphrodisiax's "Keep It Moving" is almost as radical, its house groove pivoting around gaping holes and sudden percussive trills while a dubbed-out horn refrain lurks ominously.
On a recent Footloose 1xtra set, Footloose mixes straight from Canadian deep house producer Suge’s marvellously spooky “We Belong To The Night” (shuffling tribal drums, eerie synth washes, and the kind of muffled female vocal samples that Orbital often liked to use to signify suffocation in space or something) into “Unfinished Business”, and the resulting groove complication and intensification is absolutely stunning – it’s like “We Belong To The Night” actually fractures into a million percussive shards to form the Aphrodisiax tune.
In this context the house beat persists like a ghost haunting the groove. On ILM I compared these tracks to similarly wow-factor counter-intuitive grooves in 2-step – James Lavonz’s “Mash Up Da Venue” or Bump & Flex’s Dancehall Dub of Cleptomaniacs’ “All I Do” – but as Jacob Burns has noted, the crucial difference lies in how funky house (in the mix, at least) implies house even when it departs from it dramatically.
For sceptics this will be a sign of the genre’s inherent conservatism, but it shouldn’t be understood as such: think of it instead as the music’s structural security blanket. Much like the role played by the song in 2-step, house operates as an implied origin and final destination that underwrites all of the music’s adventures and experiments, its reigning principles attached to each track like a rubber band that (for now at least) it is more profitable to stretch than to snap. In 2-step the death of the song as the genre’s fundamental stylistic basis ultimately demanded a wholesale transformation into other genres (dubstep and grime being the results). Certainly much of the excitement of funky house’s development has stemmed and will stem from the troubled nature of its relationship to house; but the attractions of this particular constellation rely on there being a relationship to trouble.
Delinquent ft KCat – I Got You (Delio D’Cruz Remix); DMP vs Sadie Ama – These Were The Days (Crazi Cousinz Remix); T2 – Butterflies (Arms Remix) The D’Cruz remix of Delinquent and KCat’s “Get Off The Wall” (or “Get On The Floor” – the correct title isn’t quite clear) has become one of my favourite vocal tracks, it’s fruity collision of quivering girly R&B vocals, stomach butterflies bassline and a fabulously decadent stop-start beat reminding me of Mis-Teeq’s sorely underrated “Eye Candy” (the track not the album). “I Got You” is much like “Get On The Wall” but with a more physical (perhaps less sprightly but more impacting) groove and fabulous carnival horns (their intensity towards the end is quite insane) that give the tune a slightly ruffer, less refined vibe.
Carnival flavours are a regular theme in funky house, perhaps because this has been the traditional point of convergence between house and Caribbean music (from “Hot Hot Hot” to Beenie Man’s “Jump & Wine” to “Calabria”). But the other factor is the curious attraction of cheap-sounding synth-horns to get that carnivalesque flavour, which have offered a way for producers to gesture to the past and the future in one movement, to sound grassroots and hi-tech simultaneously.
Jacob Wright noted on ILX that if speed garage was massively inspired by Todd Edwards, funky house might exist in the same relationship with Basement Jaxx. This is unverified (I’ve never seen or heard any tribute being paid or even Jaxx tracks being used in funky house tracks) but from a listening perspective it makes perfect sense. Of course the Jaxx don’t correspond to a single style, so let’s be specific here: if there’s an individual precedent it’s the pummelling electro-dancehall of the Jaxx Wild Dub of Ronnie Richards’ “Missing You” from 1997 – listen to it back to back with Donaeo’s “African Warrior” (sounding more essential all the time, incidentally) and tell me you don’t hear the connection. Basement Jaxx seemed to show signs of returning to their roots a bit on Crazy Itch Radio – the charming vocal house of “Hush Boy”, the dubious carnival chaos of “Run For Cover” – but they probably would have done a better job of it if they’d had a chance to be circularly cross-inspired by funky house. This is their chance, and I’ll be disappointed if they don’t seize it.
On a related note: a possible sequel to “The Whole Night”, the Crazi Cousinz remix of “Those Were The Days” seems quite keen to cover as many emerging trends as possible – girly R&B-ish vocals with a bit of cut-up vocalese action going on, post-“Calabria”/”Heater” gypsy vibes (with a mirage-like accordian melody threading through the groove) and even kinda bassline/dubsteppy wobbling bass, not to a mention a more upfront beat than is usual for these guys. Crazi Cousinz are emerging as consummate walkers of the pop/underground tightrope, much in the same way that Artful Dodger were able to in 1999 (speaking of which, the Artful Dodger’s funky house tune “One More Chance” is pretty tight) – polished and catchy, of course, but with superlative, inventive production, and grooves too strong for clubs to ignore.
Major Not£$ - Scream Out (Dub) Mario – Mario Brings The Bloodclaart; Hornz “Scream Out (Dub)” is built around the kind of ringing atmospheric synth tagline that lurks in those in-between (and, let’s say it, Balearic) places where trance and chill-out converge (it was kinda cool when Michael Mayer was pushing this sound about five years ago). But the rollicking tribal drums and ruff bassline quickly dispel the notion that this is about chilling out. Mario’s tense “Mario Brings The Bloodclaart” and “Hornz” fold this wispy bittersweet polyphonic back into the general carnival trend, with particularly stunning results of “Mario Brings The Bloodclaart”, where the oddly melancholy cheap synth-horns build into a gorgeous, tremulous harmonic crescendo – there’ll be tears in the yard before the dance is over.
Rose Norris – Live Life A great example of how much funky house resembles dancehall circa 2003 with it’s totally omnivorous attitude to any musical idea that might work. “Live Life” is primarily a snappy uplifting vocal number, but it also includes a gloriously cheesy ragga rap and eerie operatic backing vocals that remind me of the outro for Jamie Principle’s “Your Love”. It’s those operatic vocals that grab you on the first listen, but “Live Life” is also a good example of how even the vocal end of UK funky house is slowly separating itself from typical house norms. I complained recently that US producer Quentin Harris’s recent album had too many tracks where the vocals felt oppressively square and on the beat, and there can be a slightly regimented feel to a lot of vocals in house music (a shame: Harris’s gorgeous remixes for Jill Scott reveal how otherworldly even relatively conservative US house can sound with a bit of R&B swing to the vocal). But in UK house the vocals are becoming increasingly, well, funky, their looseness drawing from 2-step, from lover’s rock and R&B. Although it’s as much a case of the syncopation in the rhythms injecting the vocals with a greater sense of verve. Either way, Norris does a lovely job here, her sly performance wrapping expertly round the bristling soca counter-rhythm – it’s the sense of affinity between the vocal and the groove that makes this so replayable.
Ear Dis – Sun Daze T2 & Addictive – Butterflies (Arms Remix) Spoonface – Yang Style; Wine Pon Dem; Boogie Time Riddim; When I’m Dancing “Sun Daze” is a good example of funky house’s curious avant-isms (or one of them anyway): the assymetrical, unpredictable groove doesn’t invent a new rhythmic matrix, but simply extends the more complex, broken end of tribal house way past the former boundaries of rhythmic perversity. Ear Dis member Arms is smashing it on the remix front – his Booka Shade-ish remix of Tawiah’s “Every Step” being a highlight. But I also really like his grunty remix of T2’s “Butterflies” with its zapping laser gun syncopated beats.
Spoonface is in Ear Dis with Arms, but his solo productions are much more muscular than the mostly vocal tunes the duo make together – but even his vocal tune “Keep It Dancing” has incredibly distracting surround-sound drums on a heavy dose of steroids (ironically the diva extols the power of “such a simple little groove”). Highly reminiscent of the most in(s)ane aggressive dancehall, and also building on the foundation provided by Masters At Work’s “Work!”, “Yang Style” and “Wine Pon Dem” also make me flash on Jess & Crabbe, the short-lived duo who briefly threatened to transform French house into raucous ragga-house. “Boogie Time Riddim” is big and stupid nouveau speed garage, “Hot Hot Hot” horns decking it out with reggaematic synth melodies, a massive bassline and a random assortment of cut-up vocals in the closest thing I’ve heard to New Horizons since, well, New Horizons. Check the blatant EQ fuckery in the breakdown – I can’t think of a tune that sounds like it was more fun to make.
Dub Boy – Funky Underground Vibe – The Way We Get Down Kurupt Rek – Rock 2 The Beats This track is totally hyper: rolling fractured tribal drums so exquisitely textured, so clatteringly physical that you could almost reach out and touch them. The last tune that had the feel of “Funky Underground” for me was David Howard’s brilliant 2-step anthem “U & I”, which was something of a rhythmic highpoint for the scene – both tracks feel like they’ve built their rhythms from samples of of a hundred ball bearings bouncing down twisting corridors. Unlike “U & I”, “Funky Underground” is an instrumental track, but with its bumping bassline, horn fanfares and triple drum track I’m not sure where you’d find space for a song. The dense, breakbeaty, two-drumkits-falling-down-the-stairs “The Way We Get Down” reminds of the Stanton Warriors before they went crap and were still using garage as an excuse to make captivating breakbeat-house. But it’s grounded by its bracing Ruff Sqwad horns and fragile flute hooks. “Rock 2 The Beats” is less precedented, its combination of Japan-style hollow-chime drums, exhaust-pipe xylophone bassline and soca meets broken beat groove the sort of thing that could only emerge from funky.
Fuzzy Logik – Twiss A fabulous track, and yet another (like Malice’s remix of DJ Spen’s “Gabryelle”) that sounds more like early Nasty Crew than anything else I can think of. “Twiss” is all sharp asymmetrical beat attack and apocalyptic string riffs, but it retains an air of levity with a classic hardstep-style ragga vocal sample "gangsta turn and twist!" and a diva singing "pick you up and turn you around around around around around around around around!" at the top of her lungs. As with “Leader” (which comes with “Twiss” on the flip) it’s the way that each element plays off eachother that makes the end result so fascinating, so endlessly listenable.
But “Twiss”, more than just about any other track, also sums up the appeal of this music as a whole, its ecumenical combination of ingredients seeming to touch on ardkore, jungle, speed garage, 2-step and grime simultaneously. As such funky house could be seen as something of a grand recap, connoisseur party music for people who’ve followed the crazy journey the whole way along. But it also feels like the beginning of the story, an origin as much as a goal – if Burial is often sold as being a memorial for “the hardcore continuum”, funky feels unburdened by its history – its voracious appetite for ideas that will rock the dancefloor overrules any other consideration; the past emerges out of the future (and vice versa, of course) on tunes like “Twiss” only because these are ideas that are too good to die.
I could blather on endlessly – but I can’t help myself. There is simply nothing more exciting than this stuff.
More Good Stuff: Roska – Believe In Love; Feeline (VIP Mix) Da Hardy Brothers - Dance With Me Diamond ft. Kele Le Roc – Nothing Funky Akatreil – On & On (Dub) Princess – Frontline Babyface Jay - Brazilia DJ Naughty – Fire Power Unknown – Darqueness Marc Ambience – Bad Habits Scotty D – Liberty Malice – Visions Footloose – Just Leave (Roska Mix) NB Funky - Nutz; Open Your Wings 23 Deluxe and Daniel Joe – Show Me Happiness (DJ NG Remix) DJ NG - Tell Me (Geeneus Remix)
Reviving the blog to talk about my most urgent musical obsession these past few months. The article I wrote for Idolator on funky house was meant to be a bit of a broad, general intro to the genre, and as you’d expect was rather brief, at least for me. It covered my general thoughts about the scene and the music, but left no room for me to say much about individual tracks. This is my chance to remedy that somewhat. Please note that this doesn’t represent by half all of the great tracks in funky house – there are many amazing tracks, some of them my favourites, that I’ve yet to ID (like that amazing one with the Jagged Edge vocal sample – “Rolling down the lonely highway/asking God to please forgive me…”). And I’d be astonished if the amount of great tracks I haven’t heard doesn’t exceed the number of those I have.
If you haven’t read the Idolator piece, go there first, then come back here for tunage ideas. And if you haven’t downloaded Marcus Nasty’s mixes from his myspace page, what on earth are you doing?
Kyla – Do You Mind (Crazi Cousinz Remix) Probably the biggest anthem on the scene, “Do You Mind” is easy to underrate, though not because it’s initially underwhelming. More insidiously, “Do You Mind” sounds great on the first few listens, but only great – you feel like you have its measure pretty quickly. The full extent of its charm is partially concealed: it lies in a certain air of inevitability to its progression, the irresistibility of its sensual allure. The key is in the higher-level science of the covalent relationship between vocal and groove, with the song rising and falling spectacularly through verses, choruses, cut-up vocals, build-ups and breakdowns – none of which would work without the relative subtlety of those gorgeous underage sex vocals. Also, Crazi Cousinz have found a great, relatively subtle production signature in those little orchestral “woooh!” they use, mostly a mark that a momentary pause for breath is just that, and the tune is about to kick into a devastating new gear; the whooshes before each chorus in particular are totally grin-inducing.
Crazi Cousinz – Bongo Jam Impossible to overstate the greatness of this track, though less as a peerless example of funky house than as a superlative pop song – perhaps it’s the “Sweet Like Chocolate” of funky house? Yes, the groove is killer: the supple bongo percussion, those marvellous “woooh!” sounds, the maracas, the cheesy menace of those moaning backing vocals. But really, this is all about that vocal: “Sometimes I wake up early in the morning, to play my con-con-congo.” One of the songs of the year.
DJ Naughty – Quicktime (VIP Mix) “Quicktime (VIP Mix)”, like a lot of Naughty tunes, is relatively straightforward, just a rolling loop of mesmerising latin piano and sprightly bongos – of all the big producers, Naughty’s the one who pitches funky house furthest along the most reductive interpretation of its point-of-difference (those bouncy, latin-infused grooves). What distinguishes Naughty’s production (and this applies to his streamlined remix of Crazi Cousinz’ “Bongo Jam”) is the massive flushes of dub bass that shake the entire bottom end of the track. Some people will probably mention dubstep here, but the uptempo agility of the tunes puts me more in mind of those system-failure dub basslines you’d hear in 93-94 jungle (think Back 2 Basics’ “Horns 4 ‘94”) – entropising yr waist line while the rest of your body keeps dancing.
As with Perempay (see below), a lot of Naughty’s new productions suggest he’s set to get deeper and more lustrous rather than, er, naughtier – stark, synth driven, syncopated deep house grooves not too far from Ame or the Liebe*Detail label.
Apple – Appletizer; Segalizer; Mr Bean; Bean Get Well Soon; Chill Out Pls Apple has a seemingly endless supply of these totally insane grooves that have absolutely nothing to do with house. Of all the funky house producers Apple is the one most obviously pushing the genre at the margins, and he’s gotten a lot of props as a result. “Segalizer” is pretty typical: a simple but hyper synth-horn melody rising and falling over tough super-syncopated beats whose like haven’t been since the Bump & Flex Dancehall Dub of Cleptomaniacs’ “All I Do”. Like Wiley’s early production work, Apple makes quite a few variations on his basic grooves – “Appletizer” is pretty much an alternate take on “Segalizer”, while there are many variations on “Mr Bean”, of which the totally perverse metallic beats of “Bean Get Well Soon” comprise my personal pic. Don’t sniff at this practice though: as DJ tools all these variations are brutally effective. Meanwhile “Chill Out Pls” features an utterly compelling but ah, shall we say challenging tribal groove giving way to slamming house beats. Although Apple rarely sounds like house, he always sounds like Masters At Work. Not quite sure how that works.
Roska – Feeline; The Climate Change EP Alongside Apple, Roska is probably the most avant producer on the scene: his tracks have little if anything do with house, and are more like madcap contraptions assembled from bits of broken machinery. The shuddering tribal pounce of “Feeline” is at least funky (in the normal sense of the word), but The Climate Change EP takes his counter-intuitive rhythmic sensibility to new levels. One track staggers forward on quick kicks, metallic snares and massively hype-inducing rave whistles like a Frankenstein’s monster; another’s perverse lurching, block synth-string riffs, metallic snares and use of space (with kicks only on the first and fourth beat) reminding me of early Skepta riddims like “Meridian” and “DTI”. What’s hard to explain is how these tunes still manage to work as house music: you can follow the groove even when there’s no concession to even an imaginary 4X4 beat. These tunes sound particularly great when the DJ mixes them in following a more straightforward vocal number: the sound of their whirling beats ravaging another, more polite track can have a satisfying air of brutality.
Che’Nelle – Hurry Up (Footloose Remix); Ear Dis – I Feel (Footloose Remix); Babyface Jay – Tribal Zone As hard as Apple or Roska, Footloose is rather more straightforward: why bother with trickily programmed rhythms when you can just plump for blunt soca beats and hard-as-nails basslines? His remix of Che’Nelle’s “Hurry Up” has that deliciously sickly vibe you sometimes end up with when the R&B vocals get crushed by the wheels of the groove – like the original tune pumped up with a dangerous level of steroids and amphetamines (the rap from Tinchy Strider is a nice touch, too). “I Feel” is kinda ridiculous but ace, with squealing electro-funk hooks and a sighing male R&B vocal unceremoniously swept aside by a murderous bass-driven groove.
Like those Footloose productions, “Tribal Zone” is pretty no-nonsense, just slamming soca beats, hyper synths, enormous bass and this totally compelling metallic hook that sounds like robots tearing eachother apart. Except that when you listen more closely, it’s got these awesomely ominous male choral vocals intoning wordlessly in the background. That weird short-section between unconcerned simplicity and “what the fuck” randomness is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the case that funky house is running things right now – the scene isn’t concerned with artistry, but it creates artistry as a matter of course.
Fuzzy Logick – Leader It’s almost impossible to explain the irresistible appeal of “Leader”: is it the squiggly descending synth hook, the almost giggly levity of its syncopated snares, the gorgeously naff organ interludes, the riot of bubbly detail (literally bubbly at times: some parts sound like jetstreams of bubbles rising through champagne, but I also love those inaudible shouts of “hey!”), or just the insatiability of the groove as a whole? “Leader” reminds me a bit of New Horizons’ “Find The Path” in that on paper it looks conservative but in reality its sounds utterly unique, a blast of reggaematic party music from the future.
“Leader” is one of those tunes that makes more sense in the mix with MCs, like so many funky house tunes, but in fact there’s a more specific appea here: few things sound as amazing as the groove of “Leader” creeping into the mix while the MC continues his rapping as if unaware. Traditionally not much attention has been paid to the relationships of change and continuity in MC-based dance music – perhaps because MCs rapping over tunes properly in the mix usually transforms into the emergence of full-fledged rap tracks, freestyles etc. Funky house, much like that moment when garage transformed into grime via 8-bar, allows the MC to act much like a DJ, using his vocals to stitch tracks with disparate grooves into single, cohesive track.
Seany B – Stompa; TNT – Rumba The excitement of funky house isn’t exclusively defined by a move away from the straightjacket of the 4X4 kickdrum – in fact a lot of the best funky house maintains a rigid 4X4 pulse but finds otherwise to bring that wriggly, wired feeling so crucial to almost all the best tracks. “Stompa”, produced by former More Fire Crew member Seany B (not the BBC 1xtra dancehall DJ of the same name), bluntly pivots around a resounding, booming steady kick, but its two note piano vamps, rippling bongos and ratatat snares make it as perverse-feeling and intoxicating as anything else in the genre. Like “Stompa”, “Rumba” gets a lot of mileage out of its hypnotic 4X4 clomp, around which TNT hangs a slithering latin groove and twinkling synth hooks to give it an almost tidal sway back and forth. The way the beat cuts out and then doggedly resumes is an obvious but devastatingly effective trick, creating a mindless slave to the rhythm vibe that is blatantly sexual.
Tadow – Rising Sun “Rising Sun” is maybe the most hyper funky house track for MCs to strut their stuff over, and it’s not hard to see why: basically Tadow has resurrected wholesale the grime 8-bar, that back and forth switch between two motifs that gives tracks a palsied hopping feel, with each switch driving the temperature up a notch. The other style that’s always done something like this is dancehall, the similarity perhaps most obvious in the latter’s hyper-electronic, maximalist phase circa 2002/2003 – think the Famine, Wanted or Mudslide riddims, which would switch between motifs, usually one melodic and one spare and booming. “Rising Sun” feels a lot like that era of dancehall, only souped up for faster, ravier dancefloors, with the Eastern sparkle of its first motif descending into the urgent bass throb of its second. On a Marcus Nasty set I have, MC Shantie trades lines over this track with Rankin’, who reprises (modifying slightly) his rap from The Dreem Teem’s remix of Amar’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” (this time: “There’s no question of a doubt/I’ve checked all the DJs out/Marcus Nasty’s the best that I’ve heard/spread the gospel, gotta spread the word!”) – it’s just about the best thing I’ve ever heard.
There’s another track that does this perfectly too, though I can’t ID it – possibly a Marcus Nasty dub, given its Nasty Crew-like feel – that alternates between dramatic, scene-setting gypsy strings and sudden explosions of bass and scalpel-like synth riffs, digging at the groove with delirious intensity. There’s possibly no better exploitation of tension and release in dance music – at least since the VIP mix of The Endz’ “Are You Really From The Endz” (a tune that this, like many funky house tracks, eerily resembles).
Diamond – Champagne Dance (Dub); “Love At First Sight (Dub)” Some of the more songful but harder funky house tunes sound a lot like that shortlived phase of female vocal grime – “R&G” – like Davinche and KT Pearl’s brilliant “Mr DJ”, but also the equivalent period of female vox soca-beat garage from circa 2002, like TJ Cases’ peerless stunner “One By One”. The dub of “Champagne Dance” is impossibly large, there’s just too much going on to keep the whole tune in focus at once. An impossibly morose descending synth melody (somewhat like Rapid’s slower, more histrionic productions for Ruff Sqwad throughout 2003) fights for your ears with raucous MCs and typically svelte vocals – “we’re in the club/getting down/shake that bottle/spray it round round round.” Not quite sure why this relatively straightforward celebration of a good night out is matched up with a groove so filled with existential angst, but it works a treat.
The Dub of “Love At First Sight” is less essential, but its weird mixture of sighing high-pitched vocals and aquatic riot is even further out, somewhere between Terra Danjah, Polow Da Don and Basement Jaxx’s “Always Be There”. Along similar lines to these tunes is an awesome number even more like “One By One” that I haven’t been able to ID yet – the lyric goes “Oh! I want you oh so close! I wanted you to know that you are taking over, over me…” If you know it, hit me up.
Sticky – How Very Dare You Like a lot of former 2-step producers who branched out after the scene’s switch to grime, Sticky is making a tentative return to the fold: although he’s still persisting with his “dirty pop” productions (rather unnecessarily), “How Very Dare You” is a brilliant funky house vocal anthem that essentially picks up where Sticky’s 2002-2004 era tunes left off: riding an absolutely lethal breakbeat groove, featuring massive bass drops and gorgeous duelling trumpet solos, not to mention a pissed off diva vocal quite out of keeping with funky house’s usually agreeable, swayable divas. I was disappointed, though that what sounded like a bunch of baby gremlins shouting “Game on!” was actually Sticky’s production signature, “Dirty Pop!” But this tune is all about the bass drop, which really does have to be heard to be believed.
Geeneus – Yellow Tail, Make Me; Benga & Coki – Night (Geeneus Refix) Geeneus impresses with how far he can push just a few key ideas. On “Yellow Tail”, a galloping soca-house groove is rudely interrupted by an unforgettable high-pitched vocal sample (everybody says it goes “Ai ai ai ai ai ai!” but I hear “Fight fight fight fight fight fight!”) and then a blast of icy discordant synths. “Make Me” is tribal in a way quite unlike other funky house tracks – it’s closer to something you might expect from German producer Samim, all fractured and springloaded micro-percussion, evocative pulsing bass and eerie single note synth hooks, while a woman whispers seductively “Make me dance… all night long…” “This one is deep”, Rankin warns on one set, and then one the bass comes in, demands “See what I mean???”
I grew to quite dislike Benga & Coki’s anaemic dubstep-house anthem “Night”, which is like a party tune for a scene that doesn’t know how to party (this is not strictly fair perhaps – check Quest’s “The Seafront” for a much a better version of the same idea). Geeneus does very little to it, but the simple addition of a rumpshaking tribal house groove suddenly turns that bleepy descending riff into the instant-party starter so many claim it to be. Still, it was mildly distressing to see Target come out with a tune so clearly modelled on “Night” – no, Target, no!
Tawiah - Every Step (Arms Remix) A good example of how far funky house can deviate from “funky house” while still approximating the same appealing qualities: the original “Every Step” is a mournful rock-R&B hybrid, like a better take on Jamelia’s “Something About You”. Arms’ remix turns it into a funky house equivalent of R&G, contrasting slamming syncopated beats and tearful trancey descending chords aping Booka Shade’s “Mandarine Girl” (or maybe he got the idea from Madonna’s “Get Together”). Tawiah’s performance has an unvarnished quality that is deeply appealing, and there’s a damaged, bittersweet quality to the song that contrasts nicely with the more straightforward concerns of most vocal house. But no matter how good Tawiah is, it’s the massive, bass-driven breakdown that is the real star here.
Donaeo – Devil in a Blue Dress; African Warrior I was initially underwhelmed by “Devil In A Blue Dress”, or at least it seemed good but unremarkable. How wrong I was: like Kyla’s “The Whole Night”, this is a song that you expect to have a short lifespan but grows more evocative with each spin. The groove is fantastic, squeezing seven rapid kicks into a singler bar over doom-laden descending bass riffs and under typically frantic soca percussion. How Donaeo manages to fit such a seductive R&B vocal over the top and make it sound so natureal is beyond me.
As you might expect from the title, “African Warrior” shifts things up several notches, moving into quite aggressive territory. Donaeo apes R Kelly a bit here in several ways, from the double entendre lyrics (“I’m an African warrior, rolling with my stick in my hand” – needless to say I misheard this the first time through) to the hoarse vocals for the chorus to the lilting singjay quasi-rap interludes. The groove is absolutely cavernous, a surround-sound explosion of spiralling tribal drums reminiscent of Lenky’s Dreamweaver riddim, and an evil speaker-tearing bassline straight from Sticky’s “Booo”.
DJ Spen – Gabryelle (Marcus Nasty Dub?) I’m going on guess work here: the original “Gabryelle” is a big, brash US house track with slashing strings. Someone (I’m guessing Marcus, since he loops a “Marcus… Nasty… Dub… Plate” vocal over the top) has resurrected those brutal strings and set to work within a stripped back, evil but bouncey house groove. The end result sounds like Nasty Crew’s “Take ‘Em Out” being remixed by, um, maybe Derrick Carter? Or even Claude Von Stroke (whose “The Whistler” is quite popular among funky house DJs). As you’d expect from a former member of Nasty Crew, this one’s an absolute killer for MCs. In related territory, I’ve heard a funky house track whose fractured tribal groove could almost belong to a record put out on Luciano’s Cadenza label, except that no Cadenza record to date has included Bounty Killer samples.
Perempay – Hypnotic A lot of the great funky house tracks aren’t obviously rulebreaking, staying rather close to the rulebook the genre inherited from producers like Dennis Ferrer and Quentin Harris. But these are great producers, and some of the UK versions are pretty fabulous – especially in the mix with a good MC on top. These tracks are minimal rollers, mostly just little piano licks and string pads, perhaps some organ and a resonant house beat to round things out. Perempay is the former grime DJ Bossman, but “Hypnotic” is totally classier than thou, the groove shimmying ever so gracefully around bell chimes and sparse string flares, while the delicate addition and subtraction of hi-hats wrecks devastating consequences.
TNT – Take It Low; Skepta – The Rolex Sweep (Fingerprint Remix) “Take It Low” is an MC track but is totally an uptempo party track – after the success of “Wearing My Rolex” this might become quite a popular manoeuvre for MCs, on tracks both inside and outside of funky house. Not to much to say it about except that I love its rickety good times vibes, kinda half-arsed sweet R&B bridge, and the killer verse hook “Up/down/roundanowanow!”). “The Rolex Sweep” is surely a response to “Wearing My Rolex”, and nice enough, although kinda silly in parts. Fingerprint smashes the remix, with a hard as nails snare work-out that, as with Roska productions, takes this far away from the house template (in fact like “Climate Change” the idea seems to be trying to imply house while actually have an in-time kick as little as possible). So muscular it makes the original track sound a bit underfed. Crucially, these tracks are deeply sexy. Expect a lot more MC tracks like them in the next few months.
DJ NG – Tell Me; MA1 – I’m Right Here; Seany B – Make Your Move; Crazi Cousinz – I See You; Crazi Cousinz – High Heels; Geeneus – I Tried; Seany B – Dirty Thoughts; Delio D’Cruz ft. K Cat – Get Off The Floor Gotta big up my ladies on these ones – funky house seems to have an unlimited supply of really great vocal tunes. I’d give all of these a personal rundown but this was the last block of tunes I was planning to write about and I’ve run out of energy and I’m coming down with a cold. Suffice to say that I don’t want this side of the scene to disappear – these are great singalong tunes, and the production on all of these is not to be fucked with. Specific kudos to that warm, glow(er)ing bassline on “Make You Move”, the general vibe of claustrophobic on the potential crossover anthem “Tell Me”, the supa-tight diva rhymes on “I’m Right Here”, the supa-sexy stop-start groove on “Get Off The Floor”, the stabbing pizicatto strings on “High Heels”, and the perverse, strangled flute hook on “I Tried”.
skykicking end of year report: album of the year I first head The Endz “Are You Really From The Endz? (V.I.P. Mix)” on The Nasty Crew’s Nasty Show set in early 2003, and ever since it’s probably been my favourite 8-bar of all time (I even wrote about it on skykicking at about that time, though back then I didn’t know which mix of the original track it was). What a brilliant, perfect, unprecedented and, perhaps most significantly, unrepeated groove it is: the post-“Boo!” rrrushy beat and string riff sections competing with those spare, drum-only piledriving dancehall interjections, like one of those cartoon car races where the two leading cars exchange the lead position repeatedly and instantaneously, back forth, back forth. Was there ever anything more hype-inducing? By today’s standards, this tune is probably a bit too 8-bar-ish, too ruthlessly mechanical in its frenzied, palsied alternations (mind you, with tunes like “Sidewinder”, one wonders…), but I love it enough to quietly mourn its passing.
I finally tracked this down on CD about a year later when I bought the Ministry of Sound Street Beats comp, whose Femme Fatale disc is really quite underrated. It’s pretty much the only official document of the explicit “8-bar” moment in early grime, when Youngstar and Big$hot and Jon E Cash were running tings with their ultra-simple metallic grooves. As a “Greatest Hits” document of this moment in garage’s lifecycle the Femme Fatale set does pretty well: most of the justifiably inescapable stuff like “Bongo”, “War”, “Stomp” and “Target” are present and correct, as well as several of my personal faves like J-Sweet and Cameo’s “Baby”, one of early grime’s most jittery moments, and surely Gemma Fox’s finest hour – her ragga-laced vocals here sound like B15 Project’s “Girls Like This” on bad speed (forgive the “x sounds like y on z” bullshit, it’s true!).
Listening to the disc last week, I was again reminded of how quickly grime has developed its own competing narratives: alongside grime-as-8-bar, there’s grime-as-dubstep (foreshadowed on the Slimzee mix on the same comp), grime-as-UK-hip-hop, grime as nu-rave-R&B (can we think of something other than “R&G”? It’s less unwieldy than “grimette” I’ll admit, but it’s also a bit boring and limiting, emphasising the wrong part of the music I reckon), grime as pop-rap… One of the nice things about The Nasty Show is how it pre-empted so many splintering developments and yet seemed oblivious to the fact of the splintering itself.
And it follows that for me the better grime sets tend to be those which traverse the boundaries of these different incarnations, rather than the ones that draw lines in the sand. There’s another reason for this: the different incarnations all in some way relate to a genre of music external to grime, and in their haste to mark themselves out and declare allegiances they will often all to readily leave grime proper – e.g. on Ruff Sqwad’s Guns & Roses mixtape, the eagerness of the crew to make grime-as-US-street-rap results in a lot of indifferent freestyles over familiar US beats. Pluralist grime mixes are less likely to get pulled into oppositional orbits, more likely to try to capture grime qua grime. The danger of holding out any particular direction as being “the way” forward for grime is that doing so almost inevitably leads away from grime as a distinct approach.
I say all this to temper any extreme conclusions that might be drawn from me saying that Target’s Aim High 2 mixtape is my favourite album of the year. Which it is, but not in the sense of it being the definitive statement of grime’s ideal future.
At their weakest, Target and Danny Weed both tend toward polite, barely distinguishable hip hop grooves – Target’s production for Riko’s “Hands Up” (not on Aim High 2), for example, has very little to recommend it beyond its own professional functionalism; thankfully nothing on Aim High 2 is actually bland, but a few tracks such as Wiley’s “Be Yourself” – with its warm, sentimental piano chords and uplifting male R&B chorus – are perhaps a bit too refined for their own good. Bob Zemko from Spizzazzz has complained that Target is the LTJ Bukem of grime, but moments like these tend to remind me more of MJ Cole - a rather subtle distinction I realise, but one I think is interesting to think about.
Bukem has a nice historical parallel for any damning critique of Target: you merely need to repeat the narrative of stellar, starbound early efforts deteriorating into insipid classy musicality (to come? Already here?). MJ Cole circa his first album provides a better sonic parallel though, for good and for ill. There were, of course, those insipid classy tracks, which didn’t achieve anything beyond proving Cole knew his way around a string section and had listened to a lot of acid jazz. There were the bassline tracks, which rejected class in favour of roughhousing physicality (the cynical among us might say that such efforts were at once very deliberate-sounding and still a bit too polite). And there were also the occasional track like “Crazy Love”, which, while sophisticated and refined, were just too breathlessly joyous to be drab.
But there was also Cole’s finest moment, “Sincere (Y2K Dub)”, which stretched his duelling impulses – pristine, delicate soul ambiance and devastating bass lines – to their mutual extremes, gorgeously echoey piano tinkling ascending from a fog of eerie reversed strings and sighs, before vanishing into a black hole of bass onslaught. What I love most about this tune is its spectral quality: its beauty is so fragile, so fleeting, so imperfect that it seems to be a vision from another world, another order of existence. The successful co-existence of these elements always appears to threaten the symbolic security of the music, to gesture toward emotional states we have no words for. In my wilder flights of fancy I can sense in this balancing act a certain gap or hollowness, a link between worlds which allows its different, opposed elements to contact each other. It is the preservation of this gap, this space allowing for the emergence of spectral apparitions, which entails a certain aesthetic of minimalism, of restraint, a willingness to not fill in the void.
But, of course, an aesthetic of minimalism and restraint can all too easily become its own end, losing sight of its original purpose and prioritising instead an oppressive blankness. This is the quandary of dubstep: almost all the best dubstep has devoted itself to exploring this spectral connection (as early as the flatlining diva seduction of Horsepower Productions’ early classic “One You Need”), but its elevation of minimalism to a foundational a priori can make it easy to lose sight of the original balance, to celebrate the void itself rather than what it gives rise to.
It’s in this sense that Target and Danny Weed’s early work together always resembled dubstep idealised: their classic “Fresh Air” was the grime 8-bar at its most eerie and delicate, populating the valley of the shadow of death with tiny white flowers. Target’s remix of their co-produced “Pick Yourself Up” for Wiley was practically haunted, its lugubrious synth motifs evoking a Bronte-style romantic fatalism which lethally undermined Wiley’s own paean to self-improvement. Target reworked the same vibe on his now signature tune, Riko’s “Chosen One”, whose hazy Oriental mirage of a melody recasts Riko’s spiritual trek into a post-mortem journey toward the light.
By the time of Aim High 2 (released at the beginning of the year – it’s taken me a while to work up to writing about it), it is really Danny Weed who is filling this role. His best, most muscular work retains on the one hand an air of menace and sense of forward propulsion from his early 8-bars, as well as a slightly unreal, supernatural vibe. On Donae’o’s “Bark” the ascending bass in the chorus acts as tension builder, before an agonising (if only momentary) pause announces the release of the verses, constructed out of synths torn between mimicking viola riffs and Arabic accordions, not to mention a panoply of percussive dog yelps.
The same ingredients (using gunshots instead of dogs) form the basis of his Shank Riddim, which provides the rhythmic bed for three freestyles here. Shank Riddim has an almost gypsy vibe about it, conflating near east, middle east and far east (as with some Low Deep riddims, it reminds me a bit of Jammer’s old gypsy tunes like “Mystic”); at once more aggressive but also more mournful than “Bark”, it’s music for spells and incantations, for warding off evil spirits with other evil spirits. Danny has kept the faith with 8-bar’s secret weapon: the frenzied palsy hop between motifs that renders the music so impossibly exciting, ramping up the tension with every switch.
Target has largely abandoned the 8-bar structure; his recent grooves attempt a perfectly sealed singularity, intricately syncopated rhythms dovetailing back into themselves with a quietly shuddering intensity that is at best utterly hypnotic. On his remix of Sadie’s “So Sure” he brings Terra Danjah’s pretty but oddly formless original production into sharp focus: the foreground stuttering rhythm constrains Sadie’s yearningly high vocals, evoking the fragility of her optimism as the anchor that prevents the tune, and Sadie, from floating off in reverie. And yet the tune still strains against its chains: Target introduces woozy piano chords and eerie synth clouds which blur the line between melody and atmospherics – between the here and the elsewhere. If Danny Weed’s productions envisage the outside as something to be feared, warded off, kept shut out, Target is much more ambiguous, mingling uncertainty with a certain sense of desire and yearning – his remix of “So Sure” turns a simple declaration of love into a séance dialogue.
I love this pathetic quality which infuses so much of his work: turgid basslines doing battle with twee trebly synth and string motifs. Even the aforementioned piano chords can work marvellously when they’re held in check by the chilly and mechanical surroundings, the metaphorical flower struggling up through the crack in the street pavement of a dead city. On harder tracks like Roll Deep's "Trouble", the same ingredients (morose string riffs, intricate percussion loops, portentous electro bass riffs) are employed to create impressively austere steel lattice grooves: if Danny's harder tracks retain an edge of raucousness despite their dark mysticism, Target goes for widescreen precision depictions of war and destruction - instead of recreating the sweaty directness of the physical or verbal tussle, the groove plays the role of the sad-eyed chorus, shaking its head in unison at the tragic hubris of the foolish brave challenger who went up against its host MC.
It’s all pretty melodramatic stuff, and the rapping on Aim High 2 is correspondingly almost always very serious, mostly stories of self-improvement through adversity or apocalyptic battle rhymes. The first tack has become a bit of a cliché for Target productions, especially after “Chosen One”, and indeed there is evidence here of what I’ve been calling in my head “the Riko Fallacy”: the idea that there is a direct relationship being the quality of an MC and their focus on soul-bearing – named after Riko because so many people seem to rate said MC based on how many times he talks straightforwardly about being poor or something, when in fact he’s at his best when sliding into near-incomprehensible patois (the oneupmanship ragga chat with God’s Gift on “Dead That” being far superior to his round table with Dogzilla on poverty in “Critical”). The sad fact is that many MCs lose all their wit, their flow, their verbal imagination, when they try to get in touch with their feelings, erroneously assuming that “straight talk” is an ends in itself. Not everyone is a Dizzee, and nor should they feel the need to be.
Case in point here being Dogzilla’s “Never Ending Story”, a somewhat self-absorbed and uneventful story about the myriad of hardships which Dogzie has faced on his way to the… er, middle? Delivered in that “no gimmicks” transparent professional hardman voice of his, the entire track feels like a lecturer leading a class on the topic he wrote his thesis on - noble exception being the inspired bit where he dreamily lists a string of Ayia Napa-related destinations, which comes closest to capturing the captivating stream-of-consciousness torrent of grime’s primary m.o., freestyling.
When it comes to white MCs I far prefer the somewhat ridiculous Discarda of the Wile Out Onez, who’s all gimmick, splicing Crazy Titch’s comically unhinged aggression with a cockney thug accent that I half-suspect was inspired by The Streets’ The Irony of it All. Discarda has nothing to say, really, but he delivers his spittle-flecked battle raps with a wonderfully rhythmic intensity, a rising fury that gives his tenuous jokes an ominous edge – he doesn’t really care if you find him funny or not: “I’m back, back on crack, not in that way in the other way, I’m on cracking your head off road, I’m back on the block, back on rocks, not in that way in the other way, I’m on rocking you up I’m on brocking you up I’m on blocking you in a dead end, I’ll stab the shit outta you in a dead end!” I find it totally arresting, fascinating: it’s not the lyrics themselves, and it’s not anything about Discarda (watching him freestyle the same lines on the accompanying DVD is a curiously deflating experience, he’s such a scrawny type, and the amateurishness delivery makes me wonder just how many takes it took to get the perfect performances on the album), it’s the flow, the way its rough unstoppable torrent mirrors the non-stop thud and judder of Target’s morosely implacable groove.
Even better than Discarda’s flow is the unstoppable machine that is Roll Deep when they’re on form: their harder tracks here are nothing short of astonishing, a composite of different performances whose value far exceeds the sum of its parts. What gets me about Roll Deep is the preponderance of memorable voices: Scratchy D, whose clipped nasal flow makes him out to be the steely-eyed scientist of the group, as cold as ice (far colder, indeed, than the mostly absent Wiley, however much the latter may boast of his low temperatures); Trim Taliban, whose hoarse and slightly off-kilter flow always sounds totally unrehearsed, unreheasable; the underrated Flo Dan, deeply rhythmic and muscular, threats tautly flexing from bar to bar – his basso profundo rumble of a chorus on “Trouble” is perhaps the most chilling moment on the album; and the brilliant and endlessly versatile Breeze, moving easily from witty and acerbic to contemplative to morbid – even when rhyming at a ridiculous tongue-twisting double-time pace he sounds perfectly relaxed.
Unsurprisingly, Breeze’s “Be Like This” is one of the best and most convincing slow tracks I’ve heard from a grime artist: Target providing a slinky, cruelly sexy groove that moves at a hip hop tempo but remains as distinct-sounding as any 8-bar, while Breeze delivers a devastatingly indifferent kiss-off to a failing relationship (“don’t start getting’ on yer high & mighty/you ain’t been dropped, I let you down lightly”). It’s hard to say which is more crucial to the track’s success – Breeze’s magnetism and panache or the perfect balancing act of Target’s groove, which manages to avoid sounding like both “regular” hip hop and grime at half tempo, instead blending both sides’ genes expertly to create a distinct new breed.
And this, on a sonic level at least, is what makes Aim High 2 mostly so impressive: Danny Weed and (especially) Target are fusionists, drawing links between grime and other styles and sounds with a practiced and thoughtful air. Despite this, they are not really eclectic: their distinct sonic signatures are instantly recognisable, and they recycle certain key motifs in a manner that suggests single-minded dedication rather than laziness. Aim High 2 cycles through a range of different approaches to current grime, from the straightforward 8-bar to girly “r&g” to hip hop and dancehall fusions, but it mostly feels like a mono-genre excursion, a devastatingly consistent riff on a single theme. Despite the pair’s interest in gene-splicing, they remain faithful to the core sonic principles which they have pursued since grime’s genesis – grime is the “dominant” gene, if you like.
More fundamentally and viscerally, their grooves get to me, their melodrama and physicality and pathos short-circuiting the wires that run between grime-as-pop and grime-as-underground-music and grime-as-hip-hop – grime can and should be all these things simultaneously, and these guys know it. I don’t really know if they could or should be “the way forward for grime”, but as an example of what I like in music - any music - here and now, they fit the bill admirably.
I can sometimes be a bit complacent about buying pop albums: a combination of the fact that they’re always gonna be in stock and they take a while to fall below about $20 Australian, but also because (as I’ve mentioned before) relationships with pop artists are often more successful when structured around singles releases rather than the sustained wallop of an album. I haven’t really applied that logic to Gwen Stefani, because, unlike with say Chingy or Blue, I didn’t feel the necessity of a “getting to know you” period - I started to jump on board with No Doubt circa “Simple Kind of Life” and the conversion was complete with Rock Steady. Why stall on picking up Gwen’s debut album? This time it was just laziness.
Still, I have enjoyed consuming her solo work in single-sized portions, and rather curiously, I’ve enjoyed each successive release more than the one that preceded it. This seems to go against the consensus, which appears to be “Hollaback Girl” > “What Ya Waitin’ For” > “Cool” > “Rich Girl”, and I acknowledge that on a conceptual level the consensus position holds some merit. The underlying formula appears to be a privileging of Gwen’s delightfully dippy “only Gwen would do this” moments over the merely dippy, which makes sense obviously. “Take a chance you stupid ho” and “This shit is bananas” are, for better or worse, arresting; by contrast, borrowing liberally from Fiddler on the Roof is precisely the sort of basic inane-hook-stealing manoeuvre we’ve come to expect from pop music at large.
Except that I find that I actually enjoy the relative genericism of “Rich Girl” quite a lot; partly it’s just because it’s got Eve looking and sounding hottt in the video clip, but also because I like to imagine a pop world where the inherent ridiculousness of even Gwen’s more restrained moments becomes the standard for pop music – with “Rich Girl” it’s possible to fetishise the song as well as the singer, to invest in it as something more than another example of Gwen’s severely deranged pop nous. “Cool”, however, represents the best of all possible worlds – simultaneously a “Who but Gwen?” moment, and also a “this is what everyone should be doing” moment.
The first striking thing about “Cool” is the lesson it teaches us about 80s pop music: the question I immediately wanted to answer upon hearing it was, why does this make me think eighties so much more intensely than Fischerspooner or Ladytron or whatever? There are maybe a couple of answers to this, one being that the 80s was not nearly so devoted to roboticism for its own sake as we might like to think – indeed the most quintessentially 80s sounds are those computerised or synthethised attempts at mimicking an organic sound – the Fairlight remains the most efficient signifier of the decade, I suspect. In a similar manner, the simple guitar riff that runs through “Cool” is so much more joyfully plastic than any actual synth sound could ever hope to be (including those hyperactive synths that the song actually uses to complement the guitar), reminding me of those marvellously aerated late 80s ballads soundtracking the serious moments of Dirty Dancing etc. – actually apart from the fact that the tune is based on Yaz’s “Only You”, surely the closest reference point for “Cool” is “Hungry Eyes”??
In other words, if you were to think of eighties revivalism in terms of “Emerge” versus “Call On Me”, then Cool would be on the side of the latter. But Call On Me and all the related stabs at 80s-sampling house operate at only two levels of intensity, high and higher, and necessarily move between these two states in a strictly regimented fashion (there’s another story that could be written about Todd Edwards as the secret father of this stuff, but I’m gonna think about it some more before issuing a court order for DNA tests). And it occurred to me that, if there’s an underlying unity between “Emerge” and “Call On Me”, it’s that both records in their own way believe in the larger-than-life unambiguousness of emotional responses (electroclash often does this even when it seems to be avoiding overt emotionalism, simply by placing the emotion it lacks on a pedestal, by gesturing to the majesty of emotion that is somewhere offstage; if you play “Emerge” and “Call On Me” off against one another you end up with something like The Knife’s “Heart Beats”).
By contrast, Cool is unhurried; (bitter)sweet and even moving but neither ecstatic nor tragic. Perhaps the word I’m looking for is gentle. Most of all, it sounds to me like the Thin White Duke Mix of The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” with its stomach-churning anthemism delicately retracted, withdrawn into a state of trembling composure. And it’s similar to that other favourite of mine in several other ways too, most notably in how it appears to tell me a certain story about love in spite of itself.
I love that as a story it goes precisely nowhere, circling back on itself and making the same point in different ways because intense break-ups never follow strict temporal rules. “It’s hard to remember how I felt before, now I’ve found the love of my life,” Gwen begins tenderly, musing on the distance with which she can now reflect on a past relationship…but the song accelerates almost too quickly, barely another line passing before the first part of the chorus arrives abruptly. I like to think that it’s a case of the subject matter being simply too emotional to be tamed by a judicious sense of pacing, and the climactic chorus erupts into the song like a symptom of the true depth of feeling, Gwen’s voice angling up sharply from poised alto into trebly fragility.
The lyrics belie this premature climax: “…and after all the obstacles it’s good to see you now with someone else. And it’s such a miracle that you and me are still good friends.” When I first heard this on radio I didn’t hear this as a stubborn insistence but rather a simple statement of fact: I took the song at its word, and was vaguely pleased to hear a pop song so invested in generosity and gentility. Even the title of the song seemed pleasingly novel in its cordial poise. So seeing the (excellent) clip was quite a shock, so clearly was the subtext (they still love eachother!) foregrounded with brutal precision. Gwen, her ex and his new girlfriend sit over tea, all three smiling warmly, but Gwen and her ex’s eyes keep meeting, and from their eyes we cut to flashbacks of past passions. The graciousness of Gwen’s character affected me quite strongly even in this dialogue-free video clip, but perhaps it was her delectably chosen attire and too perfect hair that did it – she comes across like the Baroness watching from the balcony as Von Trapp goes down to meet Maria in the garden.
In retrospect I’m surprised that I ever took the song at its word, as it now strikes me as blatantly self-deceiving. On the one hand my new explanation is almost disappointing – it would be nice for there to be more ballads on the radio about genuinely wishing the best for your ex’s new relationship – but I have an addiction to this brand of self-deception in pop, ranging from the obvious (“I’m Not In Love”) to the more subtle/undecidable (see also Brandy’s “Wow”, to which perhaps “Cool” is a bitterness-free sequel). The latter type is best of all, of course: if we want pop songs which can tell us about ourselves, then we need to seek out the ones that offer us a choice, because these are the ones that allow us to take sides, to be partial. My partiality is the product of a strange obsession with the romanticism of self-deception and, precisely, the refusal to admit to regret – that strange, prickly dignity which takes the guise of altruism. In this sense, the worst thing to do is read “Cool” as autobiographical, to allow for the crushing banality of thinking of “Cool” in terms of Gwen’s history with one of the guys from No Doubt, and to bestow upon the song’s apparent undecidability some restrictive empirical finality.
One already emerging standard line re “Cool” is that it’s destined to feature in the prom scene of a future Hollywood teen flick (maybe it has already?). But it makes me think more of teen soapie than teen film. For does not “Cool” mimic precisely the basic incestuous plot development of these soapies? Think of the close-knit group of couples whose stormy relationships define the first or second season but must be put aside (or reinitiated only sporadically and usually ill-fatedly) in subsequent seasons in order to keep things interesting. What is “Cool” if not the sound of these characters forced to good-naturedly share a screen for episode after to episode, placidly observing eachother’s new relationships whilst all the time secretly burning with the unfinished business of that initial (usually unfairly foreshortened) first flowering of love? Is it not simply too perfect to imagine the original central couple of a soapie in its 3rd season, attending the final year prom with their new respective partners, only to share a slow, folorn (but resonant with meaning) dance to this song, in tribute to the many, many episodes that have brought them to this moment? As fitting conclusions go it probably still wouldn’t beat Buffy and Angel dancing to The Sundays’ take on “Wild Horses”, but it might come very close.
Tim's Trendy Dahnce Picks 1. Manhead - Doop (Reverso 68 Remix) 2. Felix Da Housecat - Ready To Wear (Paper Faces Mix) 3. Riton & Howdi - Closer 4. Michael Mayer/Matias Aguayo - Slow 5. Alex Smoke - Neds 6. Scissor Sisters- Filthy/Gorgeous (Paper Faces Mix) 7. Rammstein - Keine Lust (Black Strobe Mix) 8. John Dahlback & Francois K - ? (lemme know what this one is called plz, it's awesome) 9. Markus Guentner - one of the tracks on the "Options" 12 inch, deep mournful bassline ahoy.
The Killers - Mr. Brightside (Thin White Duke Mix) At some point a few months ago I finally admitted to myself that, far from disdaining slightly Jacques Lu Cont’s mix of Starsailor's "Four To The Floor" (on account of it being, like, Starsailor) I actually kinda loved it. When it was all over the radio early last year I was all a bit, "oh, so fuckin' typical, possibly the one big honest to goodness electro-house hit to date is based on soppy post-Travis whimpering". Which is unfair, because I certainly used to love soppy pre-Travis whimpering, and pretty much only gave up on it because all the bands in this continuum (i'm talking Coldplay etc.) seemed so afraid of the middle of their bodies.
Listen to the Starsailor original and Lu Cont's version back to back and it becomes supremely evident just how masterful the latter is: the stodgy, dragging orchestral blare replaced by supernatural sleek iciness, Mr Starsailor's whines (as lyrically awkward as ever, unfortunately) a suddenly treasurable last vestige of inappropriate displays of emotion in a mechanistic world - kinda Metropolis, at a stretch. Like a more unambiguously pop Michael Mayer, Lu Cont's primary talent is for coming up with just a few incredibly catchy hooks and watching them rub up against eachother. On "Four To The Floor" the prime examples of this are when that nagging little synth riff starts beeping lugubriously behind the vocals, and then those long drawn out echo-chamber groans of "Whoah-oh-oh" (Lu Cont does this a lot). Small additions and modulations to this limited itinerary have a huge impact: if much electro-house (especially that in the Tiefschwarz mould) suggests an almost chaotic assemblage of great sounds, Lu Cont's pieces (and Mayer's) resemble massive and at times foreboding edifices, uncluttered but grandiose architectural feats that effortlessly create and enforce an entire state of mind on the dancefloor.
There's some awesome recent Lu Cont mixes floating around at the moment: Fischerspooner's "Just Let Go" becomes a sublime piece of hyperspeed sci-fi blues (and how ominous when the vocalist murmurs "deep in this anatomy.... buried...." - this sort of marvellously portentous soundbytism is precisely why "Emerge", though no classic, is better than you dismiss it as being), while Juliet's "Avalon" is transformed into a gorgeously slithery robo-salsa that may be the sexiest thing to hit dancefloors this year. But my favourite of the recent crop is the remix which manages to surpass even "Four To The Floor" in the wimpy-indie stakes, The Killers' "Mr. Brightside".
Unlike Starsailor, The Killers are perfect candidates for a Lu Cont makeover, perhaps because they sound like they should be making dance music instead of rock anyway, as the great-hooks-in-search-of-a-point conundrum of "Somebody Told Me" aptly demonstrates. The original "Mr Brightside" theoretically finds them at the peak of their powers, leading some to suggest that a Lu Cont remix is kinda superfluous. Certainly "Mr Brightside" in its original form is like a shiny stripped down hook machine, but I also find it just a bit too focused, its propulsive pop-rock precision too easy to mistake for emotional and creative stinginess.
Lu Cont arrives with the perfect "Extended Mix". I expounded upon the virtues of Extended Mix revivalism in relation to Ewan Pearson back in '03, but recently Lu Cont has journeyed even further into this mould: his remix of "Mr Brightside" is only nominally dance music, and is certainly no more physical than the original. Whereas "Four To The Floor" was an efficient catchphrase in search of a groove to give it purpose, "Mr Brightside" is a bare-bones structure of a love song that requires emotional colouring-in to give it heart. And it is heart rather than grooves that Lu Cont provides in spades. In order to do this - to humanise The Killers' formalist eighties rock surge - he eschews all of the brutal synthetic trappings of post-electroclash in favour of an entirely different vocabulary of eighties production cliches. With a palette of lush string-pads, percolating synth patterns and bittersweet bass riffs, the sensibility that Lu Cont employs here is as close to Fleetwood Mac circa Tango In The Night or (to get to the absolute heart of bad taste) mid-eighties Marillion as it is to "Bizarre Love Triangle".
As you might expect, the mix is also full of delightful little tricks, like Lu Cont looping an echo of the word “control” in a conscious reference to his flattening remix of The Faint’s “The Conductor” from a few years back. But there’s a certain formal restraint at work here as well, a clear intention to remain in a subordinate role to the song and all the sonics are chosen with the express purpose of complementing its ebb and flow. With its glittering surfaces and sheer largesse, it's a smoothly sweeping, aristocratic take on digital romanticism that is simultaneously idealistic and hollow, blown up with melodrama but devoid of content. This grandiose emptiness is the lynchpin to the track’s success.
After spilling forth all the bile of his disgust at his (current? former?) girlfriend's (witnessed? imagined?) encounter with another man and pondering over the unstoppable force of jealousy, the singer incongruously lightens up: “…but it’s just the price I pay/destiny is calling me/open up my eager eyes/’cos I’m Mr Brightside.” In the original, dominated by tense guitar, this comes across as sneering irony, the singer preparing to return to the relationship game like he’s returning to the job he hates (you might say that “Mr Brightside” places the singer in the exact circumstances where he can become conscious of the fact that he’s socially conditioned to want a relationship, but nonetheless remains powerless to stop his desire repeating itself; the ideology is on the side of compulsive behaviour rather than belief).
Lu Cont could have remained consistent with this vision of the ultimate pointlessness and totalitarianism of love, but instead he turns it on its head: the sheer romance of the production won’t allow the singer his ironic turn, or, rather, it spins his turn further into a strange and strangely affecting affirmation of pain. Love is still pointless and unbearable, but when the singer says his eyes are eager he now means it. His eyes aren’t closed: he knows that most of the time love leads to pain. And yet he is filled with a sense of fidelity to the event of falling in love and its potential transformative power, signified in all the starry-eyed, trebly synth sounds that percolate around him effervescently. All relationships to date can be written off as a distortion or a falling-short of the ideal: Mr. Brightside refuses to learn from history because what can history tell us about such an event that would change the world so radically?
Strictly speaking I think that the singer would do well to stay right away from Lu Cont’s synthesisers, which enact the exact same sort of oddly cruel emotional manipulation that overwrought romance films do, leaving you vaguely wondering whether tragedy isn’t indeed preferable to dreary existence (the structural lie (or one of them at any rate) at the heart of romance films being their incapability of representing dreary existence even when they specifically want to). What is it about the form of tragic romance that makes it so irresistible, so resistant to demystification? Is it simply that tragic subjects are also “complete” subjects, their loss and pain simultaneously their purpose, the grounds for meaningful existence (thesis: Britney’s “Born To Make You Happy” as her lecture on Lacan’s objet petit a)? And what is art doing when it sets out so deliberately to affirm this belief? Could it be that listening to this is very, very bad for me? Or am I just addicted to music which expresses and evokes emotions which I cannot and will not articulate within my “real” life?
There are some really fantastic tracks on Casio’s Garage Anthems 2005 compilation – Alias, Crazy Titch and Keisha’s “Gully”, Statik’s “Charge” (which graced my village voice top ten for last year) , Terrah Danjah’s “So Contagious” and P Jam’s “Can’t Hold It In” being notable examples – but by far my favourite track is Katy Pearl’s “Mr DJ”. I dunno when Casio started playing this on his show last year, but it must have been fairly early because several times when I’d listen he’d play a snippet of it, as if it was by that point far too obvious to drop the total track (kinda like how by the end of last year heaps of DJs were using “Rocker” as a hype-inducing tool rather than playing the whole track). I don’t think I ever heard it in full, but every time I caught a bit I was like “what is that fantastic tune????” Luckily, Cameo chose to use Garage Anthems as an opportunity to showcase his preference for tracks which fuse grime with R&B-flavoured 2-step (sadly “grimette” never seemed to catch on as term for this outside of my own blog), so I was able to finally hear this awesome track in full.
I’d wager that “Mr DJ” (produced by Davinche) is the best and most interesting example of this grime subset yet. As much as I love most grimette, I’d concede that to date the overwhelming majority of it has been characterised by mere symbiosis rather than proper synthesis: an assemblage of complementary elements (usually with dominant and submissive components) rather than a mutation per se. The earliest proper example that I’m aware of – the Lorraine Cato vocal version of “Pulse X” – seemed almost more like a Sticky-ish novelty than anything else, a surprisingly successful experiment to see how plush and pretty this none-more-forbidding 8-bar could become with the addition of female vocals. Subsequent attempts such as Davinche’s “What I Found In You” or the Danny Weed remix of Jamelia’s “Bout”, were essentially 8-bars utilising (often rather fucked up) female vocals, within shouting distance of something like Jammer’s “One & All”. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Terra Danjah’s “So Sure” is basically a straight-up R&B tune, with only Kano’s presence and an overall sonic/rhythmic approach gleaned from grime giving the game away. Mostly, this stuff has pitched straight down the middle: unusually melodic grime productions equally accommodating to rappers or singers, and usually containing both (see Katy’s own “Leave Me Alone”, essentially a vocal version of Davinche’s “Eyes On U”).
The contours of “Mr DJ” are more difficult to trace: the rhythm, a pole-vaulting gymnastic masterpiece of ratatat snares, shivery claps and deep faux-timpani kicks, is undeniably grime, but it’s a grime that owes as much to the fluid, frisky naturalism of late-period 2-step as it does to the absurd fits and starts of Wiley et. al. Likewise, the tune is draped in Eskimo-style synth moans, but everything else about the arrangement suggests a peculiarly unmasculine darkness: the bass is deep, resonant, a black pool sucking you down rather than punching you in the face. Even discounting Katy’s singing, it really doesn’t feel hip hop-centric like most grime does, even though Jendor provides an ace guest rap towards the end. If most grime is redolent of the Dirty South, this swings back towards 2-step’s appropriations of Timbaland, only it’s not so much the early Timbaland of, say, “Are You That Somebody” as his subsequent darker productions that walked the tightrope between dark hip hop and sexy R&B (“We Need A Resolution”, “One Minute Man”, “Gossip Folks”).
But the Timbaland comparisons are a bit of a red herring, because the most revealing frame for “Mr DJ” is indeed that “late-period 2-step” I mentioned first off. I am perhaps guilty of over-valorising a certain moment or tendency in 2-step that emerged in late 2000 and dominated 2001, a moment where the femininity of 2-step was still in ascendancy, but this femininity was submerged within an increasingly rough and muscular groove framework, creating a music of subtle but rewarding contrasts, conflicts and contradictions. It was this tendency that Zed Bias celebrated on his awesome Sound of the Pirates (see Bump & Flex’s brilliant Hardstep Dub of Doolally’s “Straight From The Heart”), and Sticky’s “Boo” is perhaps the most paradigmatic example, but for me it found its apotheosis in one track: TJ Cases’s “One By One”. I talked about this track at length in my Garage 2001 round-up, but to recap: a wonderfully physical track built out of a pirouetting soca-beat rhythm and a radioactive “Neighbourhood”-style double bassline, overlaid with robo-salsa keyboard vamps, percussive xylophone hits and Kat Blu’s gloriously anthemic Whitney-impersonation. The respective sonic tricks add up to greatness anyway, but “One By One” is more than the sum of its parts: what it accomplished so gracefully was a sonic maximisation of all of these theoretical contradictions present in 2-step (male vs female, rough vs smooth, sweet vs menacing), literally dropping an overblown diva into a swamp of rhythmic danger.
In retrospect, the soca-beat trend of 2001 was to UK Garage a bit like what schaffel has been to German house and techno: an inherently short-lived escape-route from the overly-familiar confines of the more dominant groove-structure (classic 2-step for garage, four/four for house) (another nice parallel is that it makes Steve Gurley and Wolfgang Voigt – the earliest practitioners in the two styles – roughly analogous figures, which immediately brings to mind all sorts of consequent similarities between the two). In both cases, what makes this diversion so enjoyable (so immediately identifiable and distinguishable from everything else, so specifically physically affecting, but most of all so obvious and simple) also makes it something of a dead-end, at least in terms of any teleology of progression (both persist, but neither offers a stepping stone to the next big thing). Both are taken up incredibly quickly and enthusiastically, only to be dropped rather unceremoniously (see Mayer’s cooling toward’s schaffel, or the sudden across-the-board replacement of soca-beat with 4/4 revivalism, and then later “Pulse X” and all that followed).
But soca-beat was really the last the gasp of garage as an at least partially-feminine style of music; I remember being incredibly ambivalent towards 4/4 revivalism, not because I had a problem with either 4/4 generally or speed garage specifically, but because most of the newer material at the time (eg. DJ Narrows’ “Saved Soul”) seemed so grim and joyless a la most breakbeat garage! Later on, grime compensated with other considerable qualities, but it was clear by that stage that garage’s trademark femininity had been all but eradicated. And as much I love grime, I have always wondered: was the soca-beat as far as “proper” garage could go? Did it have to be the last gasp? 2001 and 2002 were peppered with a handful of tracks that seemed so alive with possibility, with an electric open-mindedness that was halfway between rave and dancehall, while being a world away from grime: London Dodgers’ “Down Down Biznizz”, Babu Stormz’s “Electricity” (which I’ve sadly never found a copy of), some of the better work from Sticky and Bump & Flex… Even The Endz’s “Are You Really From The Endz” belongs to this tradition, with its snappy choppy live-sounding drums. Surely there was a way forward for this music, even as it began to appear less and less frequently?
“Mr DJ” provides a possible answer: groovewise, not only is it Davinche’s best work to date, but it’s like “One By One” or “Boo” forced to undergo grime reprogramming, emerging more or less intact but bearing the unmistakeable stamp of about three years of post-“Pulse X” innovation. Some people have deplored the smoothing out of grime, the move away from madcap wonky grooves like “Ice Rink” or Danny Weed’s “Rat Race”. And there is something lost in the marginalisation of that aesthetic. At the same time though, “Mr DJ” shows how this “smoothing out” does not have to spell the blandification of grime: you could equally argue that it is a case of grime producers having now become so comfortable and confident with this counter-intuitive way of constructing a groove that they can now craft experimental, intricate rhythms that nonetheless make sense to the body. But even more dramatically, Katy Pearl’s performance dramatically recalls Kat Blu’s work on “One By One”, only edgier, weirder, better. Impassioned but eerie and ethereal, Katy’s multi-tracked vocals hover over the track like lightning-lit clouds, gorgeously transmuting into a robotic three-note chord as she implores “play that SONG!” like a dependent android.
Coming from the opposite direction, grime has recreated that moment in late garage where the diva is surrounded by musical forms that would appear at first glance to be inimical to her presence, but is just light enough to allow her to fight back, to hold her own. Cast down into a position of subservience while the MCs and crews took over, R&B songfulness is seeping back into grime at the exact moment when the sonic maelstrom can begin to accommodate it again. And I can’t help feeling that, had the dark 2-step of “One By One” and “Boo” and “Down Down Biznizz” persevered, survived and prospered, it would have produced “Mr DJ” before too long. Grime, so central to so many, becomes in this particular narrative a mere detour, a route around an impasse previously thought insurmountable. I’m not advocating the dimunition of grime in favour of this revival by any means – the former is still too vital, too exciting, too alive with possibility, to be done away with any time soon. But I’m enthused by the signs that the choice between grime and 2-step, and all that they represent, may no longer be that of “either/or”; that the flux and turmoil of (for want of a better binary) male and female impulses will again exert its force over this music.
I've been thinking about a lot of stuff that I want to write about, but I thought I'd start with a post commemorating all the lovely electro-house that was the soundtrack to my thrills 'n' spills in continental Europe. Big up to dance partners Etienne, Geeta and Tobias!
John Tejada - Sweat (On The Walls) Sometimes I suspect that John Tejada is forging his back catalogue on the basis that if all other german micro/electro-ish house disappeared tomorrow he’d still be able to offer a representative sampling of all its various nooks and crannies. Usually people who do this end up being a bit second-tier in all fields (jack of all trades etc.) but if there's a word that sums up "Sweat" it's... consummate. Perhaps that's why I'm starting with it: if you wanted a single track to explain to you where Germany's head is at right now, this would probably be it.
A Poker Flat release, this could just as easily have been released on Get Physical – it’s so fuckin’ lush – but a better reference point might be that it’s the hypothetical peak track on Andy Weatherall’s Fabric mix that somehow didn’t end up on there. An inquisitive, assured female voice flips between describing her clubbing experiences and asking the listener a series of questions about their clubbing and drug habits, while behind her an insistent electro riff pulses balefully, metastasising into several overlaid riffs each doing their damage to your internal nervous system, until a speed bug infested 303 arrives to finish off the job. By the time I got to Germany I suspect all the major players had caned it too hard and put it out to pasture, but when DJ Chole played it at Pulp in Paris the place went mental, you could feel people thrilling to the way Tejada just keeps on ratcheting the intensity up a notch with ever more compulsive riffs. “acid all over the place.”
Alexkid – Don’t Hide It In lieu of “Sweat”, this is along with DJ T’s “Time Out (Acid Dub)” probably my favourite moment on Weatherall’s Fabric mix. Acid revivalism is probably so passé to any sophisticated readers, but I’m rarely timely, so I won't deny that this acid torch song hits me incredibly hard. I guess a couple of years ago a sexy, vaguely jazzy vocal like the one on “Don’t Hide It” would have had a disco-based, vaguely post-French House backing arrangement (Moloko’s “Sing It Back” is a passable reference point here). Instead it’s got several acid lines squealing all over the place, and the tension between the refined and restrained vocal performance and the 303 insanity is delicious.
I was thinking that one of the things that’s so great about the acid sound (then and now) is how meaningless its mencace is. Big post-electroclash synth riffs seem to call to mind a camp/goth/punk persona as a matter of course (workin’ on the “Fade To Gray”/”Behind the Wheel”/”Blue Monday” axis); but as with Tiefschwarz’s pumping bass riffs (only more so), acid can be more like a catalytic additive – bringing out the latent danger in any source material without tainting it. But it helps here that the source material is so damn classy: as with Herbert’s remix of “Sing It Back”, the unlikely marriage of arrangement to song works its magic on the latter, revealing a undercurrent of darkness, frenzy and hysteria to an otherwise cool as ice tale of love and disillusionment on the dancefloor. “Licking venom from your hands…”
DJ T vs Freestyle Man - Beat The Street The mantle of "Most Caned Track" passed smoothly from "Sweat" to "Beat The Streets", which I heard played out a record five times. I haven't got a copy of it, so I can only describe it from memory, but the basics are an ominous, slightly dragging bassline and a heartstopping morse code electro riff, the whole groove piercing your nervous system and subjugating your limbs with the same torpid grace as Volga Select's classic-to-the-max "The Unconditional Discipline of the Bastard Prince". When Geeta and I saw DJ T at the incomparable Ostgut/Panorama Bar in Berlin, "Beat the Streets" singlehandedly and completely revived a very tired Tim at 6:30 in the morning. Maybe I'll write more when I have a copy I can refer back to, but suffice to say that the Get Physical camp astound me with their ability to push this glistening, perfectly honed aesthetic (singular - I was a bit disappointed with myself actually that I couldn't tell the difference between DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. tracks, but then Tobias informed me that Booka Shade basically writes and produces all their tracks anyway!) ever further into tourettes-style jack-yr-body territory, while still retaining the mirrorball grace that has been their calling card all along.
Olav Pozsgay - Nur Aus Liebe Of course Get Physical are currently facing some seriously stiff competition from Marc Romboy's Systematic label; it's an all out race now to see who can definitively own Chicago house revivalism in 2005. "Nur Aus Liebe" reminds me of DJ T's gorgeous "Time Out" - all metallic surround-sound bass pulses, e-lusive synth melodies and elaborate multi-tiered drum programming straight from '88. But what stops this sort of record collector house from being solely curatorial is how breathlessly romantic it is: this steely groove retains enough bouncy bittersweetness to provide the sort of structural support for lovelorn pop-songs that was French House's stock in trade. How long before electro-house produces its own "One More Time"? Or even it's own "Love At First Sight"?
Marc Romboy ft. Blake Baxter - Freakin' This one's more shamelessly retro, right down to the you-must-be-joking title, and only gets away with it by being so perfectly constructed (second most caned track in Berlin, by my reckoning). Blake Baxter, flushed from his success with Abe Duque's "What Happened?", returns with a seedy intonation so cliched that it passes right through "tired" and ends up back in "adorable" (kind of like how Little Britain jokes go from funny to boring to funny again through sheer bloodyminded repetition), a sibilant insistent seduction that pulls you through the tripping assemblage of Shep Pettibone snares before pulling you up with syncopated urgency: "Don't stop now you can't go stop now don't stop now you can't stop...DON'T STOP!" Also good on the Systematic label, though I haven't heard it enough to wax lyrical: Abysm's "Future Love/Future Funk".
Misc, Sender Records and Jake Fairley Misc's "The Magic Number" makes me want to popularise the term Marauder House. With synths like giant robots’ laser beams come to level yr city, “the magic number” seems like an ironic title for this track. The number in question could only be the code you accidentally punched into the pad for a time-delay nuclear bomb. This track isn’t so much the bomb itself as the tense, edgy minutes just prior, a riot of sounds and effects crowding around the central countdown synth-riff, interspersed with interludes of sorrowful strings, mourning the loss of a future that will never be. And then these huge, unidentifiable whooshing sounds (the city’s evacuation, riots, police and robots doing battle etc.), and the countdown riff returns with a smug “I’M BACK!” stutter.
Alongside Basteroid’s more recent material (and “Against Luftwiderstand” is a good reference point for this actually), Misc.’s stuff is kinda paradigmatic of the nu German electro-house sound: somewhere between Black Strobe’s take no prisoners assault and Areal’s wonky explosions, between the smooth charge of Speicher tracks and the fractured maximalism of Tiefschwarz, it’s at once cluttered and streamlined: destructive machines that create enormous amounts of debris but never pay it any mind. Apart from the unbeatable Areal, this sound is maybe most of all where my head is at right now when it comes to dance music: what it's got going for it is all the will-to-self-annihilation thrills that defined so many permutations of techno throughout the nineties, but moving at a house tempo gives it all a devastating prowling quality, a slow self-assurance that hard techno's jittery tempos rarely attains. There's an intelligence to its destructiveness, a tone of consideration, but it's not related to IDM by any means. When I was young what always scared me in movies were the killing machines that were more intelligent than i felt they had a right to be, as if god or technology had given them an unnatural advantage: the T1000 from Terminator 2, the velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
I liked "The Magic Number" so much I bought Misc's recent album Crunch Time, put out by Sender. Crunch Time underwhelmed me a bit at first actually, although it's a solid brick shithouse of tech-muscle that I'll now heartily recommend (key picks: "Teleworking" and especially "Momentum"). The problem with this brand of electro-house is that its meticulous clockwork menace just doesn't seem unusual when you listen to 13 tracks of it in a row, and grooves which blow your mind in the middle of a mix can begin to sound all-too-easy - in that way it's kinda reminiscent of SCSI-9's Digital Russian album, although much much tuffer.
The best way to consume this stuff is three or four tracks at a time on a 12 inch release, where you can focus instead on how the producers wring out such a variety of sounds, grooves and emotions from this toolkit of murky acidic bass slithers, withering zaps, gassy bubbles, ghostly minor key melodies, wet cracking snares and pounding pounding kick drums. When it comes to combinations of the above Sender has the market on lock, and I've yet to hear a 12 inch they've put out in the last twelve months that I didn't love. Picks of the bunch would be Misc's "Rocket Skating Remixes", wherein Basteroid, Mathias Schaffhauser, Frank Martiniq and Pan/Tone all compete to convince you that they in fact invented this sound, and especially Jake Fairley's "Going Down The Road" from late '03: three slices of peerless tech-house as existential crisis.
Jake Fairley's own recent album, the ace Touch Not The Cat for Dumb Unit (who are like Sender with added doses of punkiness), veers in the other direction from Misc, junking immaculate formalism for hefty doses of diversity and personality. He even sings on several tracks! Sadly he is Canadian not German and he sounds like he actually understands his own lyrics, which is hardly ideal for this sort of stuff. The album is basically divided between the very sort of pulveriser electro-house he records for Sender and ostentatiously glammy hard-rocking schaffel. The schaffel is almost almost almost a bit too obvious by now, or maybe it's just the Alter Ego remix of 2Raumwohnung's "Spiel Mit" felt like the absolute last word on ostentatiously glammy hard-rocking schaffel and anything subsequent to that is bound to sound like washed out homages. Fairley makes the grade on execution though, and his grooves attaining a massive sense of steroid density that even the other major players have only managed on occasion. I mostly prefer the straightahead four-to-the-floor tracks though: see for example the heart-seizure acid sinewaves and black mascara atmospherics of the perfectly titled "Prussia", whose mentalism would make even Reinhard Voigt a teensy bit scared (its thick tic-toc snares and hi-hats alone are to die for).
Basteroid – Against Luftwiderstand (Remix by Ada & Jake Fairley) I love the original “Against Luftwiderstand”, sometimes I think I love it more than just about anything else in the world, it’s just so massive and brooding, the way those slimy synths rub together like worms trying to start a fire with their bodies… This remix is even more punishing, those slashing snares forcing the ungainly groove along its narrow path with brutal jabs while Benni Benassi synths drone balefully somewhere underneath. Becoming more piledriving with each measure (I’m reminded slightly of Green Velvet’s “Flash”), it would almost be hopelessly stentorian, but for Ada and Jake adding eerie, Spacemen 3 style vocals: “I love all that you do… I do all that you say…” These floaty, disarmingly gentle sirens turn the brutality into something altogether different, a crushing swoon reminiscent of “Feed Me With Your Kiss”.
M.I.A. - Change Not that M.I.A. This one (also female) makes deep and lusciously dark electro-house for the Sub Static label, which she co-owns. Sub Static is one of my favourite labels at the moment - great releases from John Spring and Matthew Johnson - but its aesthetic is harder to pin down because the artists are often willfully individual. M.I.A. basically splits the difference between Fairley and Ada, playing down the former's muscly grunt and adding some of the latter's ethereal melodicism, with snatches of vocals buried far in the mix not unlike the remix above. But M.I.A. isn't just a point on a map; what marks her out is the exquisite glumness that characterises almost all her work. The best word for M.I.A. is lugubrious; there's a slowly unfolding, labyrinthine quality to her work that is suggestive of someone who plays with their depression a neurosis like they were picking at a scab, delighting in the sensations of their own pain, unable to leave it alone.
I like M.I.A.'s recent album Schwarzweizz quite a bit, but I'd wager the tracks on her subsequent "Sweet November" 12 inch, another Berlin DJ box staple, outperform most of the album comfortably. "Change" is my current favourite of the three: fragile dissolving melodies, whooshing poltergeists and strobing acid bass, while endlessly refracted wispy vocal samples hover nervously like a host of fallen angels. Here that depressive energy just builds and builds, with a new element of thrilling paranoia arriving every couple of bars. The whole track seems to glance forward anxiously towards some sort of explosion that never arrives (presumably you're supposed to mix it into Black Strobe's "The Abwehr Disco" or something; on this fantastic mix it leads into the Volga Select dub of "Innerstrings" instead, but near enough is good enough). Instead it just shivers and shudders in dreadful anticipation, a delightful ball of tension with no release.
Envoy - Move On (Alex Smoke Dub) If you want real goth however, park here. I discovered this on the mix I linked to above, and it's utterly irresistible: a mucky swamp of bottomless bass, tortured elephant squeals, and a near indecipherable nicotine-rattle robot chanting lines like "I think I wanna dance" as if it were a death sentence. Alex Smoke is a simply fantastic sonic sculptor, and this track is utterly impeccable, the way the sounds morph and interlock completely blows me away. Distorted snares flash like laser guns across the groove, minor key electro melodies flare and palpitate, tiny irridescent flickers of percussion form intricate spiderwebs worthy of Luciano or Ricardo Villalobos, but throughout it maintains an evil devotion to rocking out that makes me desperate to hear it played in a club. Alex Smoke's more micro-tilted album Incommunicado is pretty fabulous (more on that later), but this reveals him at his most devilishly, physically commanding.
I'll be in yr neighbourhood on the following dates:
London - 25th-31st Jan
Edinburgh - 31st Jan - 5th Feb
Paris - 5th-11th Feb
Berlin - 11th-19th Feb
Dusseldorf - 19th-20th Feb
Cologne - 20th-22nd Feb
Frankfurt - 22nd-24th Feb
Including guest appearance at Club FT in London on the 27th.
Meanwhile, this is me on Lhasa for the Seattle Weekly.
Pitbull - Shake It Up I have this loose theory about crunk 'n' bubblecrunk which is that I like the latter when it's hard and the former when it's soft. I mean, stuff like "Real Big", "Fuck 'Em" and the heavy metal tracks on the new Lil Jon album are great, but mostly there's not much grr crunk that couldn't be improved by the addition of some sparkling synthesisers and pop cuteness inna "Freek A Leek" style. Pitbull is pretty softcore generally: I have to conclude that it's his Miami heritage that makes him firmly align himself with the upbeat party music side of crunk rather than its strangled-scream dystopian side.
"Shake It Up" in particular seems to constantly threaten to turn into fullblown Miami Bass or fullblown R&B. So much to love here! The sugary, multitracked female vox, the morose 80s guitar whine in the background, the fairy floss synths that hover like pink clouds around that central perky Miami Bass groove. The only thing that would improve it would be if Pitbull would launch into Spanish every once in a while. As it is I like to pretend that he's holding himself in check in accordance with gentlemanly thug-luv principles - that slightly strained straightforwardness he's employing here is like holding his hands two centimeters away from his girl and not letting them get any closer.
Highly Flammable ft. Gemma Fox, D Double E, JME, God’s Gift, Lethal B, Crazy Titch, Jamakabi, Frisko, Tinchy Stryder & Heartless Crew – Charge (Remix) I'd been trying to remember the name of this for months and months; I should have known that my beloved Spizzazzz would have the answer all along. Anyway, this has been one of my favourite grime tracks this year, and it's definitely my favourite of the grr crash bang grime tracks (if it was a tad harder the answer would be Crazy Titch and JME's "Stop", maybe). In fact for a long time before I heard the legendary Forward Riddim I had been hoping that this was it, and I was a bit disappointed when I actually heard the latter.
"Charge (Remix)" isn't the most revolutionary piece of sonic or MC invention to come out of grime this year (but if you can ID the track on a Roll Deep Crew Freeze FM live set from March where Flo Dan freestyles over an uttterly tense eastern-riddim that sounds like Target meets Zed Bias I will love you forever); what it has in spades is sheer unstoppable energy, a forward propulsion that floods your ears with its desire to impress. The blocky rhythm (Rob Them Co OTM w/ his Ms Dynamite "Ramp" comparison) and the hype-inducing horn blasts make this highly reminiscent of "Are You Really From The Endz" and its various tuff-as-nails remixes and edits - that sort of organic rawness that's markedly different from post-"Pulse X" synthetic menace.
Right on cue every MC on track descends to near self-parody in an effort to get their basic MO across in the shortest time possible. Lethal B does it best with his straight-to-the-point "ARGH! LETHAL B'S GOT A GUN!" (complete with gunfire noises). But I mainly want to get the name of the hilarious MC who declares in a lovable high-pitched voice, "If a galla get sexual it's essential that we get sensual!" I'm sure he's terribly well-known among all the bloggers with pirate radio access. Hit me up please.
Lhasa - Anywhere on this Road The entirety of Lhasa's most recent album The Living Road is just amazing, but this is the track which grabbed me the fastest and the hardest. I'm wary of making any sudden pronouncements about this album, even though it'll probably end up at least top five of the year for me, if only because I'd probably fall into the trap of just setting it up falsely against all the other worthy (in both senses of the word) "world" music I pretend I'm justified in ignoring. But I'll fall into the trap momentarily anyway: revelling in the surround-sound multi-tiered kitchen sink rhythms, ominous trumpet calls, bottomless bass and distant bell tolls, I realised that this track could almost be by Ricardo Villalobos. Only Ricardo isn't an intense Mexican chanteuse somewhere between Fiona Apple and Edith Piaf.
Xzibit - Hey Now (Mean Muggin) That little vocal loop! Simultaneously the most pop, most dancefloor-friendly and most, er, Kanye thing that Timbo's done this year. But is just me or does Xzibit sound a bit like LL Cool J on this? Almost none of that nicotine-encrusted Method Man growl that I loved so much on "Symphony in F Major" etc.
Black Strobe - Pins & Needles The opening queasy acidic churn reminds me a bit of one of those hyper abstract menacing things that someone like Joachim Spieth might put out on a Kompakt Speicher tune, sort of smacking you in the face without any real awareness that it is doing so. Only Black Strobe are aware even if the groove isn't, cos they lace these uber-goth DK7ish whispers over the top ("I'm addicted to your sweat"), until the groove gradually wobbles out into a rollicking, thrashing synth throb that perhaps surpasses even "The Abwehr Disco" as the most unabashedly apocalyptic they've gotten to date.
The MFA - The Difference It Makes (Superpitcher Mix) Well, duh. But you should also check out James Holden's "A Break in the Clouds" which Border Community (The MFA's home label) put out last year. I'll write more about that later maybe.
Like everyone else it seems, I love love love the Jacques Lu Cont remix of Gwen's "What Ya Waitin' For", mostly because it flashes back to the magical time just pre electroclash's actual takeover when it seemed like 80s revivalism would manifest itself in the form of big dance hits that were actually huge soppy emotional epics (Cosmos's "Take Me With You" being the shining paragon 4-eva). It's all here in spades: those enormous, skyscraping synth refrains that just seem to swallow the song up in their generous embrace. The marvellously meticulous clicking and snapping percussion. That churning bass. The way Gwen's vocals feel transformed from enjoyably hysterical self-parody into some sort of absurdly over the top poltergeist. Not to mention that the opening tick-tocks remind me of Disco Inferno's "The Last Dance" (aka best track ever). (Update: Felix Da Housecat played the remix as his opening track when I saw him the other night and the crowd went wild, although whether it was because of the track itself or just Felix I'm not sure).
There's a genealogy of these tracks that you can trace right up to Gwen's contribution, and it stares back across at the blank and arch end of electroclash (most obv example Ladytron's "Seventeen") with a look of innocent, questioning pity on its face, like Jesus saying "forgive them father, for they know not what they do." The Cosmos tune of course, Daft Punk's "Digital Love", Basement Jaxx's "Romeo", Linus Loves' "Stand Back", Mylo's "Wolves of Miami"... Mylo's practically built his entire rep around pimping for this sound, and he gets a lot of stick for it, but rediscovering his remix of "Stand Back" (which is like a nuclear meltdown of tweeness, it may as well be an extended mix of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time") I can't help but adore its fierce purity, its insistence that dance music can be unselfconsciously silly and naff and uplifting like nothing since primo handbag house.
The other track which has carried the torch for this sort of open-hearted emotionalism in house in the 04 is The Knife's "Heartbeats (Rex the Dog Mix)", which by now you should all know. Even more than "What You Waitin' For", "Heartbeats" is just impossibly huge, a gaseous explosion rushing up to burst through the ceiling. Rex can't take all the credit for this: the hopelessly seductive anthemism of this track is already present in the steely electro-goth-pop original, with enormous synthesiser refrains swirling around a Teutonic declaration of undying fidelity.
To this Rex adds a stomping 4/4 house beat, but more important is what he takes away, fracturing the verses into deliberately interminable stretches of glitchy fx, static and stuttering vocal cut-ups, an act of privation and sobriety that understands intimately the economy of desire. The Knife's chorus is so perfectly seductive, so immensely satisfying, that the only tactic Rex can pursue to improve it is to stoke higer and higher the listener's burning need to hear it again, again, again. It's like a reversal of that long beatless stretch in "One More Time" - both tracks hinge upon an artificialy elongated severance of dancefloor energy and pop release in order to make the eventual unification that much sweeter. "One More Time" is of course amazing on the dancefloor; I've yet to test "Heartbeats" in the same manner but I keenly look forward to the chance to do so.
Teedra Moses – Complex Simplicity The ever-great Matt Cibula brought up on ILX how odd and cool it was that Teedra’s album had not one but two songs which swiped the theme from Prince’s 1999; odd and cool because celebrating the end of the world is not one of current R&B’s thematic specialties, except perhaps in the most metaphorical sense (and even songs which deny the capacity of existence to continue after relationship breakdown a la “I Have Nothing” or “Without You” are thinner on the ground than they used to be), so Teedra writing two songs on the topic seems significant, like she’s been thinking about this a lot.
You should read Matt on Teedra here because he’s totally spot on. Otherwise, the two main things you need to know about Teedra by way of introduction are that Complex Simplicity is my second favourite album of the year (if you trust my taste) and that she co-wrote Christina Milian’s “Dip It Low” (if you don’t). Had Teedra saved “Dip It Low” for herself she might be huge by now, but surprisingly Complex Simplicity almost entirely avoids that brand of post-Baby Boy blood rush lasciviousness; instead the album mostly harks back to various moments in the past – the frosty funk of late eighties & early nineties R&B, the sweet soul of Mary J Blige-style swingbeat, the luminescent sparkles of Aaliyah’s “One In A Million”.
If there’s a strategy at work here it’s hard to pin down: as per Tweet, I suspect that the general avoidance of booty won’t translate into acceptance within the sniffy, narrowly defined nu-soul cliques, and her evocation of the past is too erratic and subtle to pick up much of a nostalgia-based following. Those looking for dancefloor grooves (or fidgety sci-fi production that sits well next to their indietronica records) will pass on quickly, confused or underwhelmed. Whether this is a tactical error on the part of Teedra and her people remains to be seen; if Complex Simplicity turns out to be a success I might try to retrospectively sneak some line into this piece about how she was carving out some new target market. But you will remember that at the time I genuinely had no clue.
And while I’m puzzling it out, I cue up the title track for the nth time. Not content with mirroring Prince’s subject matter, Teedra and producer Pouli Poul see fit to throw in a resonant echoey snare hit at the end of each bar, just to drive home the point that, yes, this is “1999” redux. That’s about the only fancy production trick here, though: Poul provides a bittersweet arrangement of shimmering chords straight from the early nineties, but you can tell that no-one involved wants to get in the way of Teedra’s vocals. “Everybody’s worried ‘bout tomorrow, will they see tomorrow, I’m just trying to get mine off today. Mama said tomorrow ain’t promised, so I’m trying to live like it’s my very last day.”
It’s difficult to adequately stress just how perfectly Teedra delivers these lines. Her vocals, and those that follow it – like a less ragged, Southern-tinged Amerie – effortlessly convey multiple emotions and evocations at once: confidence, but experience that shadows and endangers it; disappointment, but a slight tinge of self-deprecating, no-nonsense realism that incongruously ends up conveying a sort of joy. “You can’t spend your life being in fear of all that may be. You gotta pass on, you gotta be free, you gotta breathe. Inhale, exhale, c’mon!” And then the most glorious chorus in an age: “Bounce, oh, with me tonight. Get low with me tonight.” The backing music – fanfare midi strings and horns, fireworks of electronic sparkles, wistful synthesisers, rippling glockenspiels somewhere at the back – brutally tearjerking like nothing since Basement Jaxx’s “All I Know”, Teedra the core of solidity that refuses to break down with it, preferring to dance to Lil Jon and neck a glass of champagne.
The creative challenge for any female commercial R&B artist is to carve out a sense of distinctive identity in the arguably anorexic space left once all the formal dictates of the genre have been satisfied. I think most of them succeed with startling ease – I tried to draw up a list of truly generic female R&B vocalists on ILM recently and could only a manage a bare handful – which is testament either to their talent, the deceptively roomy confines of commercial R&B or my own tolerance for endless variations on the template. Some deviate more radically or obviously than others: Fantasia from American Idol 3 tactically deploys a seemingly uncontrolled Macy Gray-style rasp to inject a semblance of hidden meaning and personal resonance into her songs (my love of “I Believe” corresponded exactly to the sense of expansion and depth which Fantasia’s performance achieved relative to the decidedly lesser execution by rival finalist Diana).
Teedra’s vocal tactics are subtler and harder to follow, slipping through the cracks between formula and idiosyncracy, but the end result of her broad-but-delicate, unpretentious-but-poetic Southern singing is a sense of profound generosity. At its best, Complex Simplicity is enveloping and nurturing, a seduction born not of exhibitionism but of an irresistible openness, with songs like heat-seeking missiles lodging themselves in my head as a protective barrier from a life considerably more exciting and emotionally fraught than the one I actually lead. So many songs here provoke with consummate ease this desire to hide from the imagined slings and arrows of the world – the weak-kneed reverie of “Backstroke”, the quiet crystalline strength of “For A Lifetime”; the calm acceptance of “Last Day” (“1999” part three). I chose to talk about the title track in particular because I’ve returned to it so frequently, so needily in the last few weeks. I’m hoping to share its restorative power.
Streaks - The Feeling (Post Rave Dub) House is a feeling, but which one? This ace track has a swarm of different divas, male and female, assuring me with drunkenly desirous whispers that “it’s just a feeling”, trying unsuccessfully to contain, limit, laugh away the inescapable plurality of emotions the groove inspires. For such a familiar concoction, “The Feeling (Post Rave Dub)” does a remarkable job at astonishing me with its covalent internal relationships of longing and loss, communion and alienation. To be lost inside a groove is to know intimately a sort of amnesia: remembering nothing, and hence hearing everything for the first time. To be found inside a groove is to experience a bodily premonition, recognising the groove before it emerges from the speakers such that when the beat arrives your feet are already in place, pulsing with the anticipation of coming home. The best dance music is that which evokes both experiences at once: “house is a feeling”, or rather a chain of feelings, of interconnected but never identical sensations we recognise but don’t remember.
Go past this waffly but heartfelt pseudo-poetry and you hear a collection of neat sonic tricks at work. Woozy Isolee chords in a minor key. A perfect, gloriously loose beat swivelling and swishing disturbingly like satin rustling against bare hips. Spare spiderwebs of Chic guitar tracing out narratives of dancefloor romance. And slow, squelchy bass riffs oozing with a delicate lassitude from every corner, such that this sounds much slower than it is, engorged with its own dubbed-out maximalism and light-headed from all that blood. Lifting away this delicious rubble, the track hits the deepest point in its topography, those eerie atmospheric synths again, around and through which a moist garage rhythm is dovetailing voluptuously, the whole track shivering with tentative cracks of the beat from which the entire arrangement recoils.
And out of this no man’s land arrives a surprisingly natural live-sounding funk bassline, tugging you gently back home, and that comforting line again, “It’s just a feeling”. Comfort is the great strength and weakness of deep house, New York garage, all those sophisticated American brands of house that are so easy to dismiss as trad and boring. Comfort becomes a weakness because it so often arrives as a meaningless surplus – exactly what is an album’s worth of opulently reassuring Naked Music tracks saving me from? The secret to this track’s appeal is that it fills in the other half of the equation. Not with danger – we’re hardly talking Green Velvet here – but rather with a profound and slightly unnerving openness, a willingness to look outside its grooves and survey the sonic opportunities, to allow for the possibility that one day we might have soulful mainstream house in which anything might happen.
(if ur interested, you can hear this on Mei Lwun’s Uno Records, which has found itself in the unlikely position of being probably my favourite album of the year)
Vanessa Carlton – White Houses I’ve read a couple of people dismiss this as little more than a knock-off of "A Thousand Miles". This is essentially spot-on, although I think such criticisms overlook the fact that "A Thousand Miles" was one of those one in a million pop songs that feels like it’s been beamed in from another dimension, totally distinctive for all its conservative pop classicism. For Vanessa to manage to make something even half as good in the same mould would be quite an achievement. As it is, I possibly enjoy "White Houses" even more than its predecessor (it’s early days though).
It occurred to me that in so many ways this is like the hitherto undiscovered middle ground between "Silent All These Years" and "Summer of ’69". Trebly piano and breathy descending verses meet a stirring rock backbeat and heart-thumpingly huge chorus. A life lived through myths versus the mythic life lived on our behalf. Vanessa synthesises this choice between the warmth of commonality and the allure of solipsism into sweeping every-girl neurosis. Like "Summer of ’69", "White Houses" has just the right amount of specificity to stand in for any sepia-toned tale of adolescence: housesharing with pretty-eyed boys, games of spin the bottle, sleeping on the floor, girls who are less smart but much prettier, losing your virginity on the leather seat of a car – the usual. None of these experiences are universal and yet they have the feel of universality, and "White Houses" pretty openly wants to make a statement about adolescence at large.
Nostalgic pop by definition plays on the attraction of the inaccessible: Bryan is temporally removed from his own former small-scale innocence, Tori emotionally removed from any capacity to accept and live in the here and now. I’m not sure if I can trust Vanessa’s attempt to combine these two types of distance: there’s a sense of both presence and absence to "White Houses", with Vanessa’s character constructed as both participant and observer, an angel perched on her own shoulder calmly recounting, analysing and judging her own actions, and maybe hating herself for doing so, and yet the song still revels in the unmediated experience that Bryan extols.
Of course this has something to do with the subject matter (at heart, "White Houses" is a morality tale, albeit one whose sentiment is familiar and agreeable), but I wonder if it’s now impossible to perform stories of adolescence, in any medium, without this insidious tension present. Films, books and songs no longer merely construct the myths of teenage years, but now are forced to tell the story of that construction, and every character is faced with the task of sifting through the cultural detritus to find a simulacrum they can trust – we might call this Dawson’s Dilemma. What we end up with is a process of selection: Vanessa demolishes one myth (those were the best days of my life) in order to strengthen another (adolescence is painful but also life-changing and character-building). But what is never in dispute is the mystical quality of adolescence, and this process of selection cannot override the inevitability of myth’s reinstatement, the ongoing need to suspend our scepticism and allow the coming of age story to seduce us. Vanessa doesn’t really speak for me, and probably doesn’t speak for you either, but I still want to cheer as she drives off into the sunset, propelled by a cavalcade of strings.
Whigfield - Was A Time Big big repeat-replay tune for me. What is it about shuffle/schaffel?!? I've already written so much about it but there's something about this stuff that makes me feel like there's more more always more to say, it's like a bottomless well of potential but elusive meaning. But the joy of "Was A Time" isn't just its driving glam rhythm; this reminds of one of those early uptempo Saint Etienne tunes ("Join Our Club" maybe, though the chiming Spanish guitar, twining round the beats like bright crimson wisteria, actually puts it closer to "Duke Duvet", or Basement Jaxx's "Rendez-vu"): blatantly populist and physical but also eerie and magical, but most importantly all of these things at once, all inextricably intertwined.
Whigfield has a great presence here as well, with hints of shrill imperiousness that remind me slightly of early Sinead O'Connor, but then folded back into her sweet pop persona - "da da da da" backing vocals and anxious-to-please key changes. Best of all, her departures into slightly scary spoken word! "Too. Bad. I. Can't. Read. Your. Mind!" She sees a europop hit and she wants to paint it black...
M. Mayer - Speaker Underrated this for the longest time: who needs Mayer in non-lush mode? But I've come around to the idea that this Chicago house throwback is one of Mayer's most satisfying records, and (theoretically) a dancefloor bomb. As with pretty much all Mayer tracks the focus is on the subtle build, from the ultra-sparse opening (just a 4/4 pound and a spectral synth hook) through ominous bass riffs and skeletal hi-hats, and then a raft tiny insectile percussive effects and that stereo-panning minimal acid squiggle, squirming around your neck, ears and shoulders. The polite gentility of the robotic vocal ("I am not a talker; I'm a speaker, speaking to you") is the key to the track's success I think: Mayer never goes for the easy payoff menace that was open to him, just a gradually increasing, compulsive disquiet, a scratch you can't itch but which seems to itch itself.
And THEN! Those slightly syncopated handclaps, only just out of time with the kickdrum so that the rhythm section generates a delightful friction. I like to think that those handclaps represent some sort of the dramatic irony, hinting at something "we" know about the groove but which the groove itself doesn't. I realise that doesn't make sense. At any rate it's a wonderful record, one whose sparseness belies the enormous amount of care and attention that has gone into its construction. I've listened to it more than just about anything else these last few weeks. I'd love to play it first in a DJ set, and feel the hair on dancers' necks rise as they begin to sense just what sort of groove is actually overtaking them.
Christina Milian ft. Joe Budden - Whatever You Want Christina's album has so many exceptional tracks ("I Can Be That Woman"! "Miss You Like Crazy"!), that it's hard to single out one, but I chose this one because it helps me to get out of bed in the morning, and indeed, may end up serving this function for the longest stretch since the tyranny of Shakedown's "At Night" in 2002. Like Mya's peerless "Free", "Whatever You Want" is a shameless, brassy disco retread, all funky bass and triumphant horns and whistles. So far so good, but it's Christina makes this track, her performance so self-assured and confident and right there that she resembles a particularly talented Idol finalist, full of live panache and wearing an outfit to die for.
Fantastic lyrics, too: "I can feel the groove when you're holding me, like to let you think you're controlling me" her multitracked vocals admit, before the "real", unaccompanied Christina cuts in, "...even though that ain't the deal - when I want I take the wheel!" with a sassy delight that's irresistible. Joe's in fine form too: "Only Mike puts up numbers like me, and he's no longer playing but"-and here somewhat remorsefully-"neither am I!" (Everyone tells me Joe's album sucks, but between this and "Pump It Up" and "Fire" he's three for three as far as I'm concerned.) Something tells me that commercially this isn't gonna be Christina's "Crazy in Love" like "Dip It Low" was her "Baby Boy" - its disco bounce fun seems too innocent and uncomplicated for the current chart climate - but I'd dearly love to be proven wrong.
Ciara ft. Petey Pablo - Goodies
Houston - I Like That I love love LOVE R&B-crunk crossover (someone on ILM labelled this stuff "bubblecrunk"!). I think back when I first heard "Yeah" last year I posted here with the guilty confession that I kinda preferred it to "proper" crunk. That remains true, except that I no longer feel guilty - who couldn't love these deliciously melted collisions of slinky song and hardcore grunt. If much crunk proper has a slightly uncomfortable aggressive air to it, tunes like "I Like That" and "Goodies" (not to mention Pablo's "Freek-a-Leek") blur the edges with soft tunefulness, so that their high-impact hi-jinx have a flushed sensuality, still deep-thrusting but more consensual, still a penetrative force but akin to a probing, questing tongue.
Like probing tongues, these tracks rest on that sexual/sickly divide. "I Like That" positively slithers, its overstuffed profusion of synths prickling and sticking to the skin on the inside of your ears. It's hard to think of another recent R&B tune that sounds so immediately large, so inviting from the very first note. And I love the array of lead vocals, backing vocals ("Wo Wo Wo Wo!") and guest raps seem to overlap eachother - everything about this track seems to suggest a certain spilling over, a wasteful excess that I love.
"Goodies" is closer to the weedy-in-the-best-sense Lil Jon blueprint (and indeed he produced this): enormous handclaps, an addictive synthwhistle hook and of course those ubiquitous rave riffs. Ciara (a singer? a group? it's hard to tell) remind(s) me of En Vogue circa Masterpiece Theatre, combining breathy allure with a cynical priggishness that verges on a generalised dislike of men - or perhaps rather the unwashed masses. For Ciara (as with En Vogue), being classy necessitates being classist, and they affect an almost aristocratic pretension here - including a brief outburst of shrill, almost operatic vocal melodrama. Which is why the clash between Ciara's faux-refinement and the unrepentant baseness of Lil Jon's production is inspired: totally undermining Ciara's claims to respectability, the cheap and wanton groove leaves them resembling bad actors in a sexploitation film, protesting in vain that they musn't, musn't give in, all the while allowing their blouses to slip further and further.
I was trying to thrash out exactly what it is that makes Tiefschwarz's recent string of remixes so startling and intriguing, and how it is that they cohere as something we might call a "body of work" when they cover such a broad range of sounds and approaches - in essence, why Tiefschwarz are to 2004 as Ewan Pearson was to 2003, awarded the title of Remixer-I-Want-To-Canonize. Listening to their mix of Mocky's "Mickey Mouse Motherfuckers" (as part of Ronan's excellent DJ-set as Omnipotent Baby, What Goes Wrong When Trying To Make Friends) it struck me that a good deal of the attraction lies in Tiefschwarz's essential crudity. Which is an odd thing to say about a duo who started off making luxuriant, "classical" deep house and now make fractured, complex electro-house epics. I guess what I mean is that, at least in their current incarnation, the duo aren't afraid to be obvious in their "juvenile" appreciation of the varied abundance of sonic tricks that litter dance music history, deploying them with all the subtlety of a "shock and awe" bombing campaign. The main attraction of "Mickey Mouse..." is a bouncy percussive bassline that reminds me simultaneously of early Warp and Technotronic, over which the duo lace a meaty, cut-up house beat and drizzling synth explosions; these are aural equivalents of Mocky's Peaches/Gonzales-style swearing, their primary purpose being to convince you that there's nothing the duo won't stoop to.
Warp and Technotronic (or early house-pop generally) are big reference points for Tiefschwarz, as they are for quite a few producers in the post-electroclash scene - it's surely only a matter of time before some French wag makes an instrumental "edit" of "Pump Up The Jam" so that Ivan Smagghe can put it on one of his mixes. Both sources are notable for the way they inextricably intertwine populism and brutalism (it's easy to forget how much "Pump Up The Jam" broods) with sonic hooks that are both abrasive and accessible, and (in the case of house-pop) songs and vocals that try for a sort of mock-toughness, a steroid sexuality. What I particularly like about Tiefschwarz though is that they don't over-emphasise the brutalism at the expense of the populism. On ILM Jess said in relation to Smagghe's Death Disco mix that if artists are going to revive early Warp then they should take their cues from LFO's "We Are Back" and not Sweet Exorcist's "Testone", and I know what he means (the greatness of the latter record notwithstanding). "We Are Back" is actually a harder, heavier record than "Testone", but its enormous, slightly silly computer chorus and ungainly galloping groove are more instantly inviting than the latter's slightly abstract menace and steely precision. As Smagghe's Suck My Deck mix shows, abstract menace and steely precision can have their own considerable benefits, but it's the way that Tiefschwarz circumvent this general tendency towards default minimalism that distinguishes them from even the best Black Strobe affiliates - and, indeed, makes their thick, voluptuous remix of Phonique's "The Red Dress" a peak moment in that set.
Where much of Suck My Deck proposes a new sort of compulsive dark-electro purism - stripping away the exterior peculiarities of electro, house, acid, bleep 'n' bass and techno to produce a sleek, shiny homage to physical menace - Tiefschwarz celebrate a profound impurism, gleefully mixing and matching the most paradigmatic, temporally-confined tricks from different styles. The music is retro, yes, but rarely do any of their mixes call to mind a particular moment in musical history; instead, the effect is closer to that of bootlegs, or the work of particularly skilled multi-genre synthesists like The Avalanches, Richard X or Daft Punk. Richard X might be the best reference point actually: if his productions imagine a world where the synthetic aesthetic of the early eighties never died, Tiefschwarz attempt a similar feat in resurrecting the rudimentary sonics and technology of dance music from the late eighties and early nineties. It's a conceit I'm sympathetic with: the fact that arrangements are now more sophisticated and subtle than those of early house-pop with its stuttering snares and pseudo-acid basslines doesn't take away from how powerfully effective that music remains, how gloriously ambitious and novel it sounds.
Of course, neither Tiefschwarz nor any other contemporary producer has made anything as shiny and unambiguous as "Vogue" or "100% Pure Love", and I wonder whether it's something they can successfully attempt. As with Kompakt-style pop-techno, the attraction here is the negotiation of two extremes: on one end, slithery electro minimalism, on the other, brash, bold-stroke dance-pop. If Tiefschwarz's work didn't attempt to master both of these extremes simultaneously I can't imagine it would be as compelling as it is. Your advised to not take titles like their "Black Box Remix" (of Chicks On Speed's "We Don't Play Guitars") too seriously - the "Black Box" as such is a spectral echo in a dubbed-out, rock-grunty house mix that even includes a weird rock/rap breakdown section.What Tiefschwarz cannilly absorb is not the disco vocals or glittery piano riffs, but science of house-pop, the physical impact that underscored the sweet hooks.
Perhaps the duo's best remix to date - and incidentally their biggest LFO moment - is their take on Spektrum's "Kinda New". I use "accomplished" deliberately, because despite their aforementioned crudity, this track is marked by its strategic use of restraint, delay, build-up and finally climax. The most immediately remarkable aspect of this record is its pompous swagger: the opening rough snare tick suggests a certain level of impatience, as if the track is biding its time until it can get going, but wants you to know that it's not one to be trifled with (like a man tapping his foot ostentatiously in a queue). Tiefschwarz build on this with awesomely resonant metallic bass hits, used sparingly to indicate that the track's full force is approaching - this time reminding me of scenes in monster films where the beast's incessant approach is marked by growing ripples on the surface of a glass of water - interspersed with these erupting bleep riffs that seethe across the surface of the groove, a tightly restrained panicky euphoria that can't help but bubble up in momentary lapses of restraint. The song's vocals, a bit too sneery in their original form, are interwoven with these effects, creating a new narrative: the smug self-satisfaction of the groove itself. "Cos you know this feeling... is something kinda new...." it whispers, later cackling "Tonight I give it up to you!". At which point the rudimentary bass groove unfurls with these glorious (but never soft) mirage-like flourishes of synth shimmers, accompanied by searing, stereo-panned Vitalic riffs and the vocalist murmuring ominously "let it in-side-you!". It's a homage to the triumph of its own inevitability - how can you resist a groove like this?
And yet for all this inevitability, the interplay of effects still has a certain unrehearsed quality, like you're listening to a junior school orchestra where the possibility of everything falling to pieces hangs over each bar like a dark cloud. Unlike with typical school orchestra fare, the dance music Tiefshwarz create benefits from this ramschackle quality; the rough rubbing together of each component deployed generating a friction that makes the groove seem to spark with static electricity. As with "Prototype", "Timecode" and "Lovelace", this emphasis on sonic interplay reminds me of Orbital, but an alternate universe Orbital where, instead of growing more sophisticated and "musical", their skill at negotiating different ideas actually devolved, resulting in tracks as lumbering beasts, drunken sphynxes (or Voltrons) whose clumsy advances demolish everything in their path quite by accident (Orbital themselves hinted at this possible new direction in their underrated late-nineties rave-homage "Know Where To Run").
This model of dance groove - grooves with transplanted sonic organs that the "body" might reject at any moment - is one which appeals to me at the moment, popping up frequently in the rough'n'ready, gloopy bass grooves of Areal tracks, or in the globular microhouse and schaffel of Robag Wruhme and the Wighnomy Bros (see particularly "Bodyrock", or, in a similar vein, Losoul and International Pony's "International Snootleg", which cycles between lush and spiky with a delicious asymmetricality). It's a model which encourages artists to think out new ways of making grooves work, precisely because they don't have to make the groove cohere, and this lower threshold allows for some inspired bits of amateur sonic surgery, suturing together ideas that can't easily be fused (remember the rat-pigeon made by Bart's identical twin brother?). Being good students of deep house and Black Stobe style electroclash, Tiefschwarz haven't abandoned sleekness completely (and why should they? Amatuer surgery isn't necessarily better than the shiny seamlessness). Instead, this and their other great tracks and recent remixes (of Hell's "Listen to the Hiss", The Rapture's "Sister Saviour", Minimal Compact's "Next One Is Real", as well as their own "Blow") negotiate a charming middle ground: a glittering electro futurism where the intestinal inner workings are proudly displayed on the outside of the reflective glass walls.
The New Thing: playing hard-dance (as in that interzonish hardcore/hard house/hard trance stuff) at 33 not 45. Seriously! Try it with UK Hard Sixteen's "Fucking Voodoo Magic"/"In Complete Darkness" (great 'ardkore-ish titles or what???). Slowed down, "In Complete Darkness" sounds especially great, a lurching throbbing goth-electro monster with slivering synth riffs, Speicher meets Vitalic meets EBM. Maybe it's just that my head is fucked with the flu, but it sounded great to my ears.
(ps. a belated welcome back to jess and andy. I loves you guyz!)
Angus likes Rex The Dog's "Prototype" and Justus Kohncke's "Timecode", and I enjoyed his description of them as "glitterball-friendly". It's the kind of thing one can only say after having listened to lots of fuzzy tech-house and microhouse, because these records are by normal standards fairly distant-sounding. They are big, they are anthemic, but there remains a sense of steely abstraction - it's not by accident that the front cover of Kohncke's Zwei Photonen depicts a glass skyscraper at night. And yet "glitterball-friendly" feels right. These records - to which I'd add Ada's amazing "Lovelace" - feel like they're coalescing into some sort of fusion of disco and tech, only perhaps not the most obvious kind. All three strike me as explicitly emotional records: the bubbling acid in "Timecode" feels like an irrepressible gush of love or joy rising through your nervous system; The forward propulsion and sheer largesse of "Prototype" imagines the excitement of first seeing a metropolis etched out against the skyline, the overwhelming sense of euphoria, displacement and freedom. Best of all is "Lovelace", with its by turns prickly and forlorn melodic motifs, gentle siren calls and warm bass churn, combining the evocations of the previous tracks and adding an astonishingly light gossamer web of sadness: the first thing I thought when I heard it was that this is the record actually playing in the background of The Streets' "Blinded By The Lights".
There's a couple of reference points I can think of for these tracks, such as Underworld's occasional blast-off into synth-laden anthemia (e.g. "Cups" if it didn't hold to such a strict division between its lush house and rave apocalypse sections). But mostly - and most curiously - I'm reminded of Orbital getting physical: "Lush", "Impact", "Spare Parts Express","Nothing Left" etc. In part, it's the interwoven melodic and harmonic complexity at work, and the fondness for shiny, rubbery post-electro synth sounds. As well, there's the way these tracks move quite openly between different melodic or sonic motifs, always "tracky" but in a maximalist fashion, denoting an attempted architectural grandeur whose tackling of the big emotions is never subtle. For "microhouse", it's definitely "big room" material, but this stuff is too rife with sedimentary material from the best dance music of the last few years (especially its most tuneful moments: French house, Metro Area-style nu-disco, electroclash, Kompakt techno-pop etc.) to be a simple capitulation into grayscale tech-house or prog house - and indeed, if you listen to an c. '93 Orbital track and, say, most of Guerilla Records' output at the same time, what leaps out is how drab and uneventful the latter often sounds tunewise, for all the fancy dubspacious arranging at work. At any rate, I'm all for this trend towards open-armed and open-hearted anthems - please let me know if you're aware of any others in this vein!
Part two of that dancehall round-up has been delayed because, right after writing that first installment, I began to feel the effects of dancehall-overdose: unconsciously choosing to listen to anything but dancehall. As a result, the write-up (which, because it requires "close listening", neccessitates intense exposure) has been delayed. Instead, I listened to almost nothing but pop-crunk for a week, then almost nothing but rock for a week, and since then it's been Kompakt Kompakt Kompakt. Doubtless in a few days time I'll suddenly find myself shuddering at the prospect of a repetitive 4/4 beat and craving some new riddims, so I better jot down any thoughts I have on the former now.
A Kompakt (and related tech/microhouse) obsession has of course been facilitated by the sudden and overdue expansion of the coverage of Limewire (mac download client of choice) into music outside the top 40, which has allowed me to hear all manner of stuff I'd resigned to missing out on, chief amongst them being the glorious Michael Mayer 12" combo of "Privat" and "Amabile" from last year. This was timely - I'd been overdosing on other Mayer classics lately ("Hush Hush Baby", "Amanda", "17 & 4", "Pensum (A2)", "Falling Hands", "Love Is Stronger Than Pride") and trying to articulate the underlying methodology that unifies these disparate tracks. I think Andy K said somewhere that Mayer reveals his DJ sensibilities in his work, which frequently focuses on the introduction and incorporation of new, complementary ideas throughout the course of a track. This is definitely a big part of what makes Mayer's material so effective: think of the way "Hush Hush Baby" moves from its light, airy burbles into that hypnotic bass churn, or how the cloud of amorphous sirens in "Falling Hands" seems to peak in intensity, only to be dragged down by a single-note bassline pulsing almost ominously. If I recall, Andy's comments were actually directed towards the Speicher track "X", where particles and fragments of sound are arranged into a lustrous chain that seems to flicker and twist constantly.
"Privat" bears all the hallmarks of a "classic" Mayer track: a lush, melancholy downbeat house number that pulses with gloomy romanticism, lonesome guitar peals recalling the mournful expanses of Superpitcher's "Tomorrow". But I slightly prefer the shuffly "Amabile": at first blush coming on like a more restrained take on the balearic glam of Mayer & Reinhard Voigt's "Unter Null" - owing to its bleepy synth hook and buzzy bouncy bassline - it slowly reveals itself to be an even more majestic tribute to melancholy than the a-side, with its viscous swirl of softly bruised synths and the gargly distant sighs of drowned children. One of the aspects of shuffletech that makes it so endlessly involving (many covered in detail here previously) is the capacity for the beat itself to be suffused with emotion and resonance so easily. This ability isn't alien to house - I've talked before about how on songs like Daft Punk's "Digital Love", or Kylie's "Love At First Sight" or Luomo's "Could Be Like This", the beat itself plays a crucial rule in shaping the emotional content and character of the song; Alexander Kowalski is a master at this as well - but, perhaps owing to the peculiar and relatively unfamiliar nature of its groove, shuffletech seems particularly well equipped to have this effect. On "Amabile" the sensation is one of spiralling downwards, of incompletion, the beat always arriving too early or too late for any sense of fulfilment or closure. Which is why those muted background vocals make me think of drowned children: there's a real ghostly effect to this track, a sense of existence suspended, wrongs unatoned or stories unfulfilled, a vision of neither heaven nor hell but instead purgatory. And so much of this is derived not from the musical devices Mayer draws on but rather the beat itself.
"Amabile" offers a vision of shuffle entirely removed from the prevailing models offered so far - the labyrinthine dub perfected by Thomas Fehlmann, or the glam of Raumschmiere/Naum/Goldfrapp, or the gentle pop of Superpitcher's "The Long Way". Instead it charts a more ambivalent course between techno trackiness and abject emotionalism in a manner somewhat similar to the glistening neo-trance sound of The Modernist, Kaito and Magnet. But whereas those three acts have patented a smooth, cruise control glide, there's an inevitable spikiness and rupture to shuffletech that cannot be erased; instead of floating on the surface of the groove I find myself inserted within it. avoiding the rigid "grid" sensation that Reynolds targets as being trance's Achilles' Heel in Generation Ecstacy, shuffletech is at once hypnotic and internally fractured - the interrelatedness of its components has a certain dynamism that allows producers to exploit subtle shifts such that their impact is seismic. Think of the way "Unter Null" shifts back and forth between emphasising the Jam & Spoon guitar loop, the glam riffs and the droning bassline, and how much this changes the entire feel of the track. This opens up a space for shuffle to be a complement to techno, tracky and not songful but explicitly emotional, big and anthemic but nuanced and complex. I'm not saying I want all shuffletech to be like this (and indeed if anything I can only see shuffletech stompin further down the glam path - check the new "We Are Glitter Mix" of Goldfrapp's "Strict Machine", which manages to be simultaneously more shuffle and more grrr rock than the original, a forceful assaultive grind laden with heavy guitar) but it's a nice complement to the other directions in which different artists are taking it.
Joachim Spieth is also doing stuff in this vein: his "Nie Mehr Allein" from last year's Total 5 comp is a hidden gem, its shuffle beat rocking unsteadily like a row boat on a swell while around it a gorgeous collusion of gauzy keyboards and soft string stabs slowly unfurls, and a dreamy shoegazer female vocal wonders "Do you remind me?" It really is shoegazer shuffle, gorgeous but somehow distracted. More urgent is his remix of Mayer's "17 & 4", which has the menacing bassline of a glammier shuffle track (eg. The Orb's "Masterblaster") but whose appeal is much less obvious - here it's the contrast (or conflict) between Spieth's ensemble of micro treble sounds and a slowly rising, sorrowful synth wash. The result is, again, reminiscent of trance - especially early Eye Q or Harthouse - but, once more, the effect is entirely different owing to the nature of the shuffle beat. Perhaps I enjoy this slightly more tech-oriented material because - contra the song stuff - it's so engrossing, so easy get lost in, while never flattening out into a deadening 4/4 pound. It's the same logic that renders the soupy Perlon/Musik Krause material so irresistible, but whereas with microfunk it's difficult to avoid or circumvent an opposition between quirky detail and energy, something like Spieth's "17 & 4" remix can pound away manically while still being a feast for the ears.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum you have something as defiantly non-tracky and yet downright brilliant as the Justus Kohncke's "Hot Love" remix of Freiland's "Frei". I won't talk about this much because it's been covered pretty sufficiently elsewhere, except to say that I love it love it love it, and that it rewards repeated listens much more than I could have hoped for - a vision of shuffle-as-glam that's not afraid to be silly and delirious and actually camp (cf. Goldfrapp's still enjoyable "camp" as stylistic accessory). It's been in my head for the last week; my boyfriend thinks I'm singing along to the T. Rex original of course. If you can track it down, fans of this should search for the Wasserman mix of Kohncke/Dorau's "Durch Die Nacht" where Wolfgang Voigt (who is Freiland and Wasserman and etc. etc. ad nauseum) returns the favour, turning the original disco-pop chugger into a magical shuffle hymn, not so much silly as halfway between whimsical and mystical, all tidal ebb and flow and majestic bass hums. Who would have thought, listening to the first Schaffelfieber comp three years ago, that this sub-sub-sub-genre could mutate into something so expansive and all-encompassing?
I love reading the Kompakt weekly sales sheets, partly to find out what's new, but mostly for the incredibly creative use of English in the description/recommendation fields, often giving rise to totally conflicting impressions as to the quality or nature of the music in question. Witness this for Tejada & Leviste's new 12": "THE FAMOUS DUO CHASES US WITH PROFOUND HAPPINESS. COMPETENT THREE-TRACKER WITH PLAUSIBLE WEIRDNESS." Or this for Waric Cameron: "SNUGGLING HOUSE TO WHICH YOU LIKE TO MOVE. WARM AND ROUND IN THE SOUND. GREAT LONG SIDE AND AFTER THE BREAK EVERYBODY WILL DANCE!!" Or my current favourite for Dick Voodoo: "CRACKING TECHNO/ELECTRO/TRASH TRACKS. SAWINGS UNTIL THE FRUITS FALL OFF THE BRANCH, SOMETIMES EVEN THE BRANCH OFF THE TREE... FEEL FREE TO THROW WITH MUD!" It's such a nice break from the sober overstatements of quality from the likes of (the admittedly indispensable) boomkat.com.
Three live sets floating around that you should track down:
1) Ricardo Villalobos Live at Voltt Paradiso 02-07-2004 - meaty funk! Token populist inclusion: Spektrum's "Kinda New (Tiefschwarz Mix)" (about which more later)
2)Superpitcher Live at Mayday 2004 - brooding mechanics! Token populist inclusion: Tiefschwarz's "Ghost Track (Black Strobe Mix)"
3) Michael Mayer Live at Mayday 2004 - shuffle madness! Token populist inclusion: Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" - "REACH OUT! TOUCH FAITH!" In all my years of listening to it I had never realised how tracky and brutal this song actually is!
And a gratuitous current top ten for good measure:
1. Ada - Lovelace
2. Freiland - Frei/Hot Love (Justus Kohncke Mix)
2. Egoexpress - A Piece of the Action
3. Tiga - Pleasure from the Bass
4. Goldfrapp - Strict Machine (We Are Glitter Mix)
5. MC Shystie - One Wish
6. Debbie Deb - Funky Little Beat
7. Robag Wruhme - August Macke
8. The Chameleons - Denim & Curls
9. Michael Mayer - 17 & 4 (Joachim Spieth Mix)
10. Fantasia Burrino - I Believe (now and 4eva)
Irony of ironies: thanks to (um) Fly or Die, the Australian rock media have finally caught onto the idea that the Neptunes are ubiquitous. Article after article appears profiling the duo’s stranglehold over the pop radio landscape. “Thankfully”, the subtext of each article goes, “they redeem themselves with their band outfit N.E.R.D., who make music that is promisingly close to rock!” Such subtexts are as inevitable as Australian articles on Outkast praising Andre 3000’s rejection of rap – he’s now bitten the Jay-Z “hip hop is corny” meme, and hey, aren’t Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, like, so amazing?? – and painting Big Boi as a selfish and desperate (not to mention talentless and worryingly playa-like) hanger-on who rides Andre’s coattails to success.
Funny thing is, far from being everywhere, it seems like The Neptunes are suddenly nowhere. I can’t think of a single hit they’ve had this year, unless you count “Milkshake”. Was “She Wants To Move” so colossal a mistake that it’s become their kiss of death? By this time last year they already had maybe ten hits for the year under the belt, a year before that maybe twenty! What’s going on?
Meanwhile Timbaland is getting around like nobody’s business. Which is a healthy sign, I think: right now any time spent away from Missy can only have a positive effect. With each new/newish Timbaland track I hear, my suspicions only go stronger: the man needs to dump this whole pseudo old-skool minimalism schtick. Yeah, it worked a charm on Under Construction, but by This Is Not A Test what had started off perfectly poised along that imaginative/goofy tripwire had fallen headlong into mulchy seriousness. The shift in Missy’s outfits from puffy pink jackets to black leather said it all really: the time for fun was over, and old-skool-the-party-trick was replaced by old-skool-the-really-wearying-by-now-lecture. I can even hear how a track like “I’m Reall Hot” has a good beat, but its oppressive plea (“TAKE ME SERIOUSLY”) just bores me.
Away from Missy, Timbaland’s moody minimalism tends to have mixed results: Jentina’s “Bad Ass Stripper” is certainly pretty strong in the slippery, sliding eastern beats department, but it’s hard not to compare its grimly lurching groove with the more extroverted pile driving of something like Bubba’s “Get Me Right” from ’01, which pulled off the same trick with considerably more enthusiasm and flair. Indeed a lot of current Timbo tracks remind me of Bubba’s first album: Lloyd Banks “I’m So Fly” and Shawnna’s “Shake That Shit” have the same mournful melodicism of that album’s more subdued Timbaland tracks (what's the melancholy guitar-driven one whose name I can't remember now?) - the former matches Lloyd’s slightly bluesy vocals with spectral synth clouds, smacking drums and some marvellously bouncy piano to create a groove that reeks of sepia – not so much old-skool as antique.
“Shake That Shit” rides a dirty, throbbing acoustic guitar line for some high noon in the Wild West tension – add some dry clicky beats and melodramatic strings straight outta Da Real World and it’s a compelling argument for the value of judicious self-cannibalisaton. Also check the persistent rustle in the background, like a horde of maracas hovering malevolently. I also like how its repetitious throb intentionally echoes “Stand Up” (being a duet with Ludacris, I guess the track is something of a sequel) while objectively sounding nothing like it. Neither of these tracks are classics, but they please me insofar as they suggest that Timbaland is (at least some of the time) back on the right track.
What they demonstrate more than adequately is that Timbaland’s power now largely (perhaps solely) resides in the allusive quality of his arrangements. Let’s face it, the rhythmic advances started to dry up at the end of ’01, and there’s not much that Timbaland can now do in that area that other producers in hip hop or dancehall (is Dreamweaver riddim gonna start invading hip hop clubs any time soon?) can’t. What he can do, and to some extent has been doing, is to hone in on the other components of his sonic equation – the instrumental, sampladelic and melodic components.
Here we must turn to Bubba’s second album, which late last year stood out like a sore thumb with its gloriously brazen use of country motifs (“Comin’ Round”), its heavy instrumentation (“Deliverance”), its formal loveliness and epic scope (“Nowhere”) and absolutely no old-skool biznizz to be seen. Jess suggested that many of these grooves could be by anyone but if you allow for the possibility of a Timbaland phenotype - existing in marked contrast, perhaps even opposition to his more celebrated work - then it’s easier to see this stuff as being part of a narrative that stretches all the way back to “One In A Million” with its birdsong and heavenly reversed guitar loop outro.
You could argue that Kiley Dean’s “Keep It Moving” is something of a “One In A Million” update (which makes its non-release even more outrageous) but it actually reminds me of the Ginuwine and Aaliyah duet “Final Warning” in its relaxed and elongated largesse. All the sound in this song is swirly and bleeding – a compressed and reversed blend of eastern motifs that cushion Kiley’s restrained performance in a palatial softness of such presence that the beats, though as nuanced and sophisticated as ever, are forced to take something of a back seat. And it’s nice to once more see beats that aren’t restricted to smashing clubs, are instead gentle or evocative. When the groove finally does reassert itself, for an eerie extended middle-eight that is the highpoint of the song, the rhythm veers close to the sort of profuse clapping used to such little effect on “Pass That Dutch” or “The Jump Off” – here, the soft wetness of the beats instead brings to mind a tango scene from a musical. It’s this perversity – subverting the beats for a purpose not originally envisioned – which lifts this use of the device above its previous incarnations.
It’s not that this eccentric approach is automatically superior to a mercantile facility for club bangers. It’s just that Timbaland has difficulty with the latter – they’re usually indifferent unless they’re also eccentric. Bubba’s “Twerk a Little” may be one of the most physically compulsive grooves I can think of, but a good deal of its compulsion arises from the body’s shock at what the beat is asking it to do. Indeed, at the height of his powers, Timbaland was crafting grooves whose brilliance had no apparent relation to eachother. How to explain the eerie, agoraphobic backwards funk of “Come & Get Me”, the coked up eastern stomp of “Big Pimpin”, the dehydrated rigor mortis spasms of “Is That Yo Bitch”, the hoover explosions of “Snoopy Track” and the high-noon handclap noir of “It’s Hot (Some Like It Hot)” all rubbing shoulders on the same Jay-Z album?
The Timbaland phenotype finds its latest and most obviously exciting manifestation in Petey Pablo’s “Get On Dis Motorcycle”, a mildly astonishing mixture of bounce beats, tensely chiming sitar (reminiscent of the great Famine riddim), swooping strings and, most crucially, a starry-eyed loop of a group of kids’ tribal chant that oddly reminds me of Disco Inferno’s “Starbound: All Burnt Out & Nowhere To Go”, simultaneously anthemic and portentous. The result is quite magical, audaciously reaching for a sparkling majesty that it’s difficult to find a precedent for. This is what Timbaland’s real gift is: not any particular approach to a groove but rather his ability to confound his own methodology, to throw away his own rulebook and just confound you with something from out of total leftfield.
It’s a narrative that is undoubtedly more “pop” than it is “hip hop”, more about imaginative and irresistible arrangements than really good beats. One suspects that the critical over-emphasis on the genotype, and corresponding embrace of This Is Not A Test and similar production work, is born of a desire for Timbaland to be more of a hip hop producer and less of a pop producer, peddling a consistent and thus easily assimilatable aesthetic whose purpose is to establish some sort of accumulative greatness through sheer persistant reliability – a DJ Premier style crafter of “quality” beats like quality rinds of pork (a related discussion that might be worth having: “How many Madlib beats do you really need?”).
But for all that his stuttering beats almost single-handedly transformed R&B and hip hop at some point in the late nineties, Timbaland’s trump card has always been his willingness to efface and deface his own signature, happily dropping a forumale once he’s squeezed enough mileage out of it. I used to lament this habit of pre-emptive abandonment (think of all the potentially amazing tracks being denied an existence!), but as time goes on and his stylistic turnover slows, the approach seems eminently sensible. While the Neptunes can (or could?) successfully churn out endless reiterations of a few basic themes, Timbaland’s attempts to rework his own ideas usually result in diminishing returns – witness the decline of his old-skool aesthetic. Meanwhile, as time goes on, it is indeed those aborted narratives, inspired experiments and out-of-character one-offs that give Timbaland’s back-catalogue its lustrous shine. If that means that we won’t get any more tracks that sound like “Get On Dis Motorcycle”, so be it; as long as we get more tracks that feel like it.
No, obviously not, but there has been a bit of rumbling on the usual ILX threads (from people who know more than me) about a possible tapering off from the outrageous highs of last year. I offered the following possible explanation there a while back:
From a riddimatic perspective, I think the biggest problem at the moment is that two many of the tunes are slotting into that vague patch between Egyptian and 20 Cent - Tunda Klap, Marmalade, French Vanilla, Worried etc. Such riddims are all variations around the same themes: fidgety bhangra beats, hypnotic woodwind melodies, a sort of soft endless flow that’s at once urgent and supremely relaxed. Such riddims are usually good or even great, but their interconnectness takes away something of the out-of-leftfield bizarroness of last year where stuff like Wanted, Mudslide, Coolie Dance, Fiesta, Ching Chong etc. would suddenly appear and take things in lots of different directions; certainly it was the radical inconsistency (in a positive sense) of dancehall which distinguished it from the other forward thinking groove scenes (crunk, grime). Whereas now I think the scene has almost settled into a post-Don Corleon quasi-Eastern consensus, and hearing these riddims back to back causes a sort of fading effect which is actually much stronger than in grime or crunk, where, although the grooves might share basic sonic components, everything is more bold and brashy and less fatally subtle.
This isn’t necessarily indicative of a falling off though: a huge chunk of the big '01/early '02 tunes fell into a similar patch between Liquid and Martial Arts – rigid electronic beats, big melodramatic string riffs etc. Certainly, late '02 and '03 felt like a period where the scene was unusually fragmented in terms of knowing where to go next, and thus went everywhere, but while this feeling has receded somewhat, it feels more like a collective pause rather than a total ossification. And there are more than enough great, imaginative, what-the-fuck riddims floating around, and even some emergent interesting meta-trends, to suggest that the whole scene is about to move on, somewhere else, with inevitably exciting results. So I’m going to talk about my favourite riddims and voicings from the last six months or so, in the hope that by the end I’ll be able to say something about where I think dancehall is going, or should be going, next.
Vybz Kartel - Picture Me & You/Nicky B – It’s On (Blackout Riddim) At first I was a bit conflicted as to which Blackout cut to choose as so many are great: Elephant Man's anthemic Staying Alive-biting "Doing It Right"? Sean Paul's poptastic "Bounce It Right There"? Even Vybz himself offered up another contender with his thrilling staccato flow on alternate take "Real Badman Never Afrad". Finally I had to pick two, which says something about the greatness of this riddim. "Picture Me & You" is the one I keep going back toI discovered first, but it’s also the one I keep going back too, stuffed as it is with great jokes, twists and allusions. Unlike Elephant Man, Vybz's pop culture references can be quite understated, and here he deftly strings together source material ranging from Coming To America to Chingy in a charming narrative (mostly) concerning the seduction of a maid. Throughout he sounds unusually sanguine and distinguished, an old hand at getting one over who plies his trade perhaps simply to polish his craftmanship.
It doesn't hurt that at this stage Blackout looks set to be the riddim of the year, for 04 what Coolie Dance was for 03 and Diwali for 02 (there's still time though!), its eastern-laced staccato stabs giving it a sense of urgent syncopated frenzy that most of the too-fluid post-Egyptian tabla rhythms can't match. If there's something which unites my favourite riddims this year, it's that, despite all the usual arrangement accoutrements, they rarely succumb to the diluting busyness that characterises many of the more generic eastern grooves. You can throw in all the counter-rhythms and strings and flutes and horns and rave riffs you like, but unless the riddim is particularly audacious and accomplished (for example, the shimmering synthcore of last year's Mudslide riddim) it's unlikely that a riddim will survive the absence of a central head-nodding, foot-stomping beat to ground and center it (my comments a while back wrt jungle grooves are relevant here). But the hyper-musical, ultra-embellished Blackout shows that this dichotomy is hardly irresolvable.
Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more melodic dancehall track than Nicky B’s utterly gorgeous voicing, whose link to the first track is tenuous at best. “It’s On” may share those irresistible staccato stabs, but otherwise the arrangement is dominated by floating, amorphous waterpad synths, a gorgeous launchpad for Nicky’s sweet R&B crooning, which positions him as a smoother Chico, a ruffer Wayne Wonder, flipping between long sustained phrases and hyperspeed Sean Paul-style singjay with a cool precision that never undermines the slightly yearning catch to his voice. As later entries will affirm, I’m finding myself particularly susceptible to R&B/dancehall fusions at the moment (did I ever mention that Wayne Wonder’s album from last year ended up a firm favourite of mine?), but it’s probably not just me; the gorgeous curlicues of melodosonic fluff that dancehall producers are so enamoured with right now is the perfect complement to the hyper-sensitive gentleness and girliness of the likes of Nicky B. Needless to say, riddims that don’t come with at least one slice of 21st century lover’s rock built-in risk seeming rather shortsighted.
T.O.K. - Sex On My Mind (Maybach Riddim) Like last year's ace Barbershop Riddim (see Vybz's "Bandwagonist", Sizzla's "Making A Mistake"), Maybach keeps it simple, sparse and skanking: a groovy little electric guitar figure gets slammed home with the trademarked car-backfiring noise from Clipse's "Grindin", and looped to fuck till it achieves this palpable physical intensity that oddly reminds me of Roni Size at his old best (remember the way the grooves in tracks like "Share The Fall" or "New Forms (Remix)" seemed to only grow in stature each time they roll past you?). Dave Stelfox says it reminds him of the Charlston!
These sorts of riddims are a bit of a double or nothing game for DJs - an indistinctive rap on something like this is just unmemorable; a good one magically transforms the whole thing into a glorious pop stormer. And if we're talking pop then we're talking T.O.K., who, whether in quasi-soca mode or quasi-R&B mode almost always bring the hooks. Here its quasi-R&B, with a slinky falsetto chorus to die for (reminiscent of "Galang Gal") and gloriously lusty performances from everyone involved, not to mention a wonderful a capella intro – “This is for the girls who love fi have sex!” It’s hard to think of an ‘04 pop song more blazingly confident – Britney’s “Toxic” or Rachel Stevens’ “Some Girls” in the groove department maybe, but T.O.K. lick them when it comes to vocals.
The greatest advantage of T.O.K.'s group set-up is how their voices cover almost the whole spectrum of male dancehall vocals, from ominous waves of bass to uncomfortable androgyny - and I reckon they understand this asset and its possibilities more intimately than Ward 21 by a wide margin. Each time a different voice takes the lead, or a harmony comes in, or there’s a charming call-and-response moment, I feel a thrilling little jolt of recognition of the indisputable rightness of their strategy. Anyway, in an alternate universe this is a massive chart hit.
Tanya Stephens - To The Top Top (Guala Guala Riddim) Guala Guala hits all my pleasure centers simultaneously. Perhaps taking its cues from Sean Paul's "Get Busy", the riddim combines a Diwali-style syncopated handclap groove with intense and dramatic keyboard flourishes, hinting at but (in many ways to its credit) not adopting wholesale the Oriental vibes that underpin so much dancehall at the moment. I love the denseness of this stuff: there's certain riddims that are so jam-packed with goodness that you want to play them as loud as possible as if your ears could drown in their voluptuous detail.
Guala Guala also uses its own density to perform the neat trick of being all things to all people: it doesn't stop short of merely varying the superficial melodic arrangements across different voicings, but rather sounds radically different according to which part of the mix has been emphasised. Sometimes it's a rollicking rhythmic number whose Diwali-derived beats propulsively charge the tune (see Anthony B's wonderful “Salt Ting”), at others it sounds utterly swamped in keyboards and strings such that the rhythm is reduced to little more than an ominous and hegemonic pulse, the whole construction shuddering under its own weight (see Vybz Kartel's similarly awesome “Ride In”).
Tanya's operates in something of a middle ground, wherein the tune takes on a certain bouncy optimism that provides the perfect backing for what is one of Tanya's most anthemic recent releases, up there with the marvellous "Soft Inside". What always distinguishes Tanya’s cuts however is an ability to balance such celebratory melodicism with a deeply rhythmic chatting style that cuts across the riddim brilliantly.
Sizzla - That's OK (Chrome Riddim) It says something about dancehall's turnover that this charmer from the beginning of the year is already beginning to feel like a "classic"; but then, I do tend to develop an odd emotional attachment to the Sizzla tunes I like, such that they don't resemble "hot voicings" so much as old favourites. He's an inconsistent fucker, to be sure, but I warrant that a compilation of his best work over the past year (including at the least "Love & Affection", "These R the Days", "All Is Well", "I Always Think About You", “Obstacles”, “Step Pan Dem”, "Come On", “Live Up”, “Making a Mistake” and, of course, this) would be pretty astonishing. "That's OK" doesn't make it easier to understand why the Sizzla tunes that work work really well, but it's enough to know that somehow, despite the man's garbled warblings, frankly shocking singing voice and occasional difficulty making or following a tune, it comes together beautifully.
I wonder if anyone else can pack such a surfeit of emotional content into their performances as Sizzla does. Of course you could dismiss Sizzla as a chronic overperformer, but it strikes me that Sizzla wields such overstatement as effectively as other artists use understatement. He feels all these things so powerfully – drunken desire, murderous obsession, unquenchable sexual addiction, bottomless love – so that we don’t have to, and in the process productively confusing the signifiers of pop for their alleged signifieds. I mean, if Sizzla ever sang “I would die for you”, you’d start removing all the knives in his general vicinity.
Almost all the Chrome tracks are great (although its own sugary R&B voicing – Chico’s “If We Try” – reveals some inherent limits to the practice), which is largely down to the suggestive power of its sonics (those rusty and rudimentary bottletop melodies, sharp string riffs and big booming drums), evocative of a sort of ruddy-faced and menacing gentility, like it’s the personal soundtrack for some Jamaican Heathcliff figure, dressed in nice (if torn and dirty) clothes but possessed of a violent animal energy. No wonder the best cuts – “That’s OK”, Capleton’s “In Her Heart” –combine the groove with a crazed insistence upon love’s inevitability, the unstoppable arc of two forces coming together, like boulders smashing in a shower of sparks.
(once again) I apologise for the quietness round these parts. A mixture of exam hell and a very large post I'm preparing. In the mean time, be sure to read ethan and minna (and mark sinker?!) over at gel&weave and simon at silverdollarcircle - both blogs are on fire at the moment - frontline sonic shocktroops! Some of the grime tracks simon talks about sound mouthwateringly good!
Contra K-Punk, I love the Wiley album, undeniably a more consistently engaging album on a musical level than Dizzee's if weaker lyrically. What Wiley misses I suspect is Dizzee's gift of metaphor; if you break it down almost all his rhymes are statements, pronouncements, accusations, denials, requests, interjections, repetitions... I'd be surprised if he ever busted out a line like "I'm hot like a kettle!" ("Pies" is the exception that proves the rule, with Wiley being inordinately and amusingly proud of this all-purpose analogy where Dizzee would just use it and move on).
But this limitation is in the right light a strength as well; much more than with Dizzee, I get the sense that Wiley is speaking to and not at me, and his emphasis on conversation and communication rather than storytelling or wordplay makes him an incredibly likeable, sympathetic and genuine seeming character, for all his unreconstructed opinions about personal agency and the marketplace. My favourite example (perhaps only because it's so familiar by now) is his admonition in the now-very-old "Happens For a Reason", "come on blud, that's not true!", but there are similiar moments peppered throughout the album. I think it's in "Pies" that he graciously shrugs off "to the man who don't like me, to the women who don't like me, that's cool, I'm bigger now!" He's such a gentleman!
And yeah, musically I think this is just more consistently satisfying than Boy in da Corner: there's nothing as absolutely astonishing "I Luv U" of course, but nearly every track is simply delightful, bursting with surprises and effervescent energy - see the glorious quasi-ambient opening of "Special Girl" swooping into those lovely SWV exclamations of "that's what I need!", or the truculent computer bleeps of "Pies", or the gorgeously tumbling avalanche of strings in "Pick Yourself Up", or the snapcracklepops of the brilliant "Next Level" (esp. for Kano's verse; hearing Kano on this simply serves to remind you how urgent and key a Kano album is) or the eerie, bittersweet synth tones of "Treddin' on Thin Ice" (with its great cod-Jamaican chorus) and "I Was Lost", both shamelessly trying to outpace Dizzee's own patented emotional arrangements.
I was struck by Mark K-Punk's complaint that little on the album lives up to what he perceived to be the emotional force of the instrumental "Ground Zero" (which appears with vocals on the album as "Doorway"; hey presto I like it more!), perhaps because as an instrumental "Ground Zero" is not really a favourite of mine; maybe it's just too morose and moody and, well, subtle for me to really connect with it. I can't deny that, for me, the largest part of the appeal of grime/garage is its visceral effect. Grooves have to be joyous or punishing or neurotic or insane; choruses have to big whether they're sugary or spiteful; sonics have to be overblown whether they're pretty or abrasive. Stuff in the middle just doesn't do it for me, I'm afraid: dubstep started to lose its appeal for me at the moment where it lost 2-step's original friskiness and became to noir-ish and spaced-out, and as an instrumental "Ground Zero" may as well be another dubstep track for all its emphasis on chilling isolationism or whatever. (I agree though that, when it comes to this sort of track Dizzee's hostile paranoia would probably make more of it than Wiley can).
Was it the Guardian that claimed "Ground Zero" was some sort of scene anthem?!?! I can't help but suspect that the line of thinking which supports such a conclusion is one which assumes that sophistication - musical, emotional etc. - can only improve things. It's undeniable that a tune like "Ground Zero" seems to evoke something more subtle and accented than a tune like "Special Girl" which plugs straight into your pleasure centers. But, I dunno, at the end of the day I like feeling plugged in a hell of a lot more. It's not even necessarily a case of "give me something I can dance to", though I admit that that is still frequently a factor when it comes to me liking particular grime tracks. What I think distinguishes grime (and 2-step before it, and 'ardkore before that) is that it's music that is unafraid to be bold, to get across its point directly and enthusiastically at the same time as being creative, original, groundbreaking even. I want my grime to be painted with broad and expressive brush strokes on large canvases with plenty of contrast and drama.
It's not that the contrasting existential-crisis noir approach of "Ground Zero", dubstep etc. is across-the-board undesirable to me - I like a lot of techstep in this mould, for example - but I guess that, going right back to '99 when I first got into it, garage has always been for me about a surfeit of intensity, a climactic release that can take on any emotional characteristic it likes as long as it doesn't hold back. You could say that Wiley as an MC holds back, but his very tone of reasonableness and equipoise tends to actually highlight the urgency and vitality of most of the arrangements. By contrast, a tune like "Ground Zero" is all about holding back - the sense that there's something missing - and that very fact means that much of its value is wasted on me. I like Mark's description for it though: "depopulated carnage". It makes me want to like the track more than I do.
For the month long interval between the headphone portal in my discman finally completely dying and receiving an iPod for my birthday, all of my listening-while-commuting (which makes up the largest part of my music listening time) has been mediated by my discman's volume-fixed Line Out portal. As someone who prefers to listen to music at tinnitus-inducing levels, I found this immensely irritating, and mostly I just switched back to reading instead; the type of music I go for just doesn't translate well when it's struggling with the train engine for audibility.
One major exception was Ricardo Villalobos's Alcachofa. Like many I suspect, I found much of Alcachofa difficult to get into at first - too dry and desiccated, clicky and whispery but with nothing that you could call an assault or a caress to accomadate my preferences for sadism and/or sensuality in dance music. His queasy textures and intricate but limp rhythms seem purpose-built to induce sensations of ambivalence and uncertainty - am I enjoying this? am I not enjoying this? Even the with the lusher moments like "Theogenese" we're hardly talking verdant green jungles or moist warm cavities; it's closer to an oddly affecting mechanical absence, like watching sprinklers go off at timed intervals over an empty and freshly cut football field.
Villalobos's "trick" is essentially a reversal of the move made by many microhouse producers who have thickened up the physical core of their sound; Villalobos, by contrast, has de-emphasised any core even further, diminishing any residual trace of the house tug, and pushing into front and center all the sound dust and sonic debris that are traditionally employed by microhouse producers to elegantly frame the groove. In doing so he asks us to consider whether such debris can stand on its own, can be a legitimate source of physical compulsion.
One would think that such music would be particularly ill-suited to low volumes, all its buzzing and scraping fading into a general melee of background noise. And yet somehow, the opposite occurs: at a level of barely-there audibility, Alcachofa's assortment of buzzes and whirs take on the essentiality of every day life: sounds without purpose in and of themselves except that they signify a quietly furious organic busyness. Ants scurrying across your floorboards with sugar grains in tow; a distant train crunching a soft drink can strewn across the track. It's almost as if Alcachofa's most loveable quality is ignorability. Which seems counter-intuitive to me on a personal if not theoretical level, yet it's the only rationale I can offer for why I'm constantly listening to it right now.
Thing is, despite my defence of Chingy, I'm unlikely to buy his album unless I find it super-cheap. That's partly because I have received all three singles for review purposes, but also because, well, Chingy really feels like a singles artist. And I don't mean that he only makes a handful of good tracks, but rather that his tracks probably only work as singles, individual songs which have been given a little prominence and contextual distinction by being released individually.
My friends Simon and Guy (who long-term readers may remember as the custodians of this blog while I languished in hospital) have (had?) this conviction that a song being made a single was cause to re-examine its worth and get excited about it, even if you were already familiar with said song by listening to the album from which it came. At the time I thought this approach was too prepared to be guided by marketing and release schedules - surely, even on pop albums, a song's qualities as a hypothetical single are usually evident prior to their actual individual release? But I'm coming around to this way of thinking.
If I'd actually bought Jackpot when it was released, there's a good chance that I would have enjoyed "Right Thurr" and found the rest a bit of a blur. Something like "One Call Away", which is gentle and above all kinda humble, might have seemed especially neglible, a paltry and half-hearted attempt to diversify into the thug-luv market from a rapper whose range seemed markedly limited. As a single, graced with radio play and an attendant video, "One Call Away" takes on a certain prominence. I can't help but hear it as more than just the inevitable third-single quasi-ballad release; it appears, rather, as a moment of narrativistic significance in my understanding of Chingy through time (ha ha does that sound pretentious).
It's one of the curious aspects of pop consumption that the focus on singles (cf. non-pop's privileging of albums) allows for a much more piecemeal construction of a performer's identity. Whereas with the non-pop artists the release of an album roughly every two years allows for a monolithic and unified presentation of identity with a relatively long use-by date, with pop the staggered consumption of, say, four songs over the course of 12 months invites a certain level of indeterminabiltiy. You might feel that you "know" a performer from their first song alone, only to be thrown off course, and forced to revise your assessment, when subsequent releases offer a totally different picture (of course on the other side of pop are those genres where the importance of the album is radically reduced - hip hop for one, but especially dancehall and many "grass roots" dance scenes, wherein artists are only ever as good as their last few tracks on the radio or dancefloor).
Grinches will say, "Oh yes, but there isn't any real space for diversity or variation within the pop world." It's true that certain juxtapositions - dance tracks and ballads, say - are in some areas practically mandatory for market purposes, but nonetheless I feel that such dictates can never finally determine the specific nature of the songs released. The singles released from Christina's Stripped may follow an unsurprising pattern of R&B-anthemic ballad-rock track-R&B-weepie ballad, but only someone with cloth ears would argue that the specific results are largely indistinguishable (in fact I'd go so far as to say that Christina's frenzied costume-changing is perhaps her most winning attribute). Whether it's Christina or Britney or whoeever, experiencing each contrasting release one by one can be more satisfying than consuming the album as a whole because, without the glut of worthy mid-tempo tracks holding things together, each individual facet of the performer's ouvre demands to be considered as identical to the persona of the performer him or herself, no matter how extreme or unusual it might be.
And even when each release is largely predictable, there are usually scintillas of individual nuance that make the puzzle assembly satisfying. I can't think of a more cliched run of singles than the first three off Blue's debut album, but that didn't prevent me from feeling (however wrongheadedly!) that they charted a charming narrative arc regarding the tussle between desire and masculinity. Crucially though, had I heard these first in the context of an album, they would never have impressed me like they did, and most likely would have struck me as the officiated and policed acts of niche marketing that sceptics will insist they are. In fact if anything the whole experience was retrospective - I didn't think that much of "All Rise" or "Too Close" until "If You Come Back" reached back in time retrospectively justified them for me.
"One Call Away" has a similar effect on me - having only heard "Right Thurr" and "Holidae In", my understanding of Chingy had ossified into an expectation that all of his songs would call to mind images of thirteen year olds in strip clubs; "One Call Away" doesn't break that perception, but it expands it into something altogether more pleasant, and while I wouldn't want to go out with the guy personally, I'm glad he's found somebody to love.
Jess in typically fine form. Great point: "I guess masculinity just recognizes masculinity".
On a slightly related note, I had been hoping that now that Chingy has plainly and unashamedly produced three great singles people would stop saying he's a one hit wonder, but it's hard to find anyone acknowleging the brilliance of "One Call Away". For shame: this could be the best thug-luv pop track since "I'm Real (Remix)"!* That beautiful fluttery guitar'n'bounce beat groove! If the Trackboyz are slavish Neptunes understudies this is definitely their "Frontin", but where "Frontin" sometimes seems a bit too smug about its angular prettiness there's something so breezy and unselfconscious about "One All Away".
* Don't hold me to that.
My appreciation of it got me thinking about the pleasures and pitfalls of thug-luv as a mini-genre. Theoretically I'm all for this stuff, and it seems to be a sure fire winner chartwise, but the results are often less than I might hope for. Problem is, I suspect, most rappers still don't know how to be comfortable about being a pussy. Ja Rule had what seemed like a magical run where his thuggishness and his sentimentality were more perfectly counterbalanced on each release (from "Between Me & You" through to "I'm Real (Remix)"), plateaued for a while, and then lost it, most tellingly on "Mesmerise", the gentle growl transformed into a hideous whine and Ashanti's sweetness "thugged up" in the most disturbing manner - it's hard to hear this tune as anything other than a paean to dirty and unsatisfactory sex (I still check for "The Pledge (Remix)" and "Reign" though!). And he seems to have abandoned the genre entirely now (a shame; I I secretly believe Chink Santana is responsible for most of Murder Inc's recent bad fortune). Other pretenders just haven't convinced me: despite a nice plushy arrangement Fabolous is too wooden and stilted on "Into You", while the sentimentality of "Can't Let You Go" is entirely carried by the chorus. And while "Dilemma" is undeniably sweet, Nelly sounds like he's holding himself back the entire time, as if his personality (let loose to such unbeatable effect on "Hot In Herre") is toxic to the song's saccharine if not kept in check. Jay-Z can manage it, but Jay-Z (although indisputably a pop icon) could never be a pop pin-up boy; and can't speak to youth-as-youth like the aforementioned three rappers can. His thug-luv ballads are too grown up, too sophisticated; "Girls Girls Girls" and "Song Cry", for example, are both loaded with intimations of romantic history, with little of the freshness or novelty of love and love troubles which pop necessarily emphasises and promotes.
Chingy's advantage lies in his age and size and demeanour of course, but also, perhaps unsurprisingly, in that which has otherwise been his shortfalling: the plausible dismissability of his high-pitched, nasal voice. I remember being disappointed when I finally heard "Right Thurr" because the deep growl of "thurrrr!" (imagine Bonecrusher or Lil' Jon) that I had imagined couldn't be further from the truth. On "One Call Away" though his voice is eminently suited: the inevitable vision of feckless youth that it evokes brings with it all sorts of associations of high school crushes and puppy love, locker room flirtations and class room distractions (being gay and having attended a single-sex school, all such associations are solely derived from popular culture, but you know what I mean). And Chingy sounds like such a gentleman here! Or, rather (and much better) a wannabe gentleman, putting on airs of suave assurance that are delightfully awkward in one who seems such a secret geek (he's like Seth Green in Can't Hardly Wait, isn't he?). I can identify, somehow, with his quest to present himself as being up to the task at hand, his fruitless desire to appear in control. It's a shame that this is being released for a particularly cold autumn over here; if it were October this would be a total spring anthem for me, perfect for cruising around with the top down in the car I don't have and can't drive.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm feeling particularly demotivated at the moment, at least for blogging purposes. Hopefully the rut will end soon though!
While its songfulness quotient is always on the rise, the role of the singer in the microhouse/pop/electro corner has largely been limited to that of the cipher or siren. As dance music first and foremost, most of these songs - even those of a neuromantic persuasion - shy away from personality in favour of deliberate and precise stylisation: as with the traditional house diva, the vocal is pure signifier. This remains so regardless of the singularity or the uniqueness of the grain of the vocal or nature of lyrical conceits on display. In the intentionally generic post-Kraftwerk effeteness of the male German vocal so predominant in the genre, the essential absence of Luomo's desiring divas, and even the arch histrionics of Coloma's Rob Taylor, there is a sense that the purpose of the vocal is purely or largely effect, and not for it to act as a conduit for some active consciousness behind the music (let's leave aside the question of whether such a thing is actually possible - it's the sense of its possibility that I'm interested in).
I don't think this overwhelming preference is lamentable, really: the very undemanding gentleness of the pop persona in microhouse is a very large part of its charm, its retiring nature eminently suited to a style of dance where the tension between songfulness and trackiness remains, and should remain, a going concern. But this very constriction of possibilities inevitably raises the question: is such a formulation an essential component of microhouse's engagement with pop? If the music sought to prioritise the personality of the singer, would it remain microhouse, or would it become something else?
That Princess Him's album More Equal Than Others seems to be grouped in with stuff like Peaches suggests that, indeed, the decision to prioritise the persona of the singer necessarily places this outside the parameters of microhouse. The Peaches comparison is perhaps not so unfair: the thick and clunky electro-flavoured house grooves which the duo favour actually remind me more of a middle ground between Playhouse and Areal, but using a very broad lens one might be forgiven for thinking they edge toward "Set It Off" territory. And yes, the female vocalist (Barca) is strident and often brazenly sexy, and she has a song called "Madonna" which starts of with shouting and ends with an interpolation of "Express Yourself" and it's all very blank postmodern innit? But the point of convergance between Princess Him and Peaches for me is actually the same point where they separate: Peaches is so focused in on personality and statement that it's the music which becomes mere cipher; sometimes I suspect that she's so determinedly lo-fi and beatboxy because to try harder would be to totally miss her own point. With Princess Him, there's an uneasy tension between the music and the persona, with both trying to grab your attention simultaneously, to say, "I am the center, the rest is just background detail."
This uneasiness, this inbetweenness, makes Princess Him oddly uncomfortable listening, and it took me a long time to decide whether I liked this album or not, whether in fact I should like it. Was what it was doing something I could broadly agree with or tolerate? I'm so used to the deferential nature of microhouse vocals that the stridency of the vocals seemed somehow inappropriate and unseemly, setting off unfortunate memories of Kosheen post-"Hide U" (a classic example of a misguided tipping of the scales towards personality and away from groove). And at the album's weakest moments (the overly serious closer "Single Action" for example) this may indeed be the closest reference point, but otherwise this was mostly an overreaction on my part, a reaction against the difficulty of pinpointing exactly what the singer was trying to do. In general I'd place her at a midpoint between early-Moloko and Curve's Toni Halliday, and she embodies a lot of the unpredictability that such an equation implies, moving from saucy to ethereal to angry to sly with an uncalculated randomness a world away from microhouse's typically strict and subtle stylisation. And I recognise that such a description could easily be categorised as glowing, but instead, perhaps because of the context, the performances struck me as undisciplined more than anything else.
But I kept listening, even as I wondered whether I liked the songs I was listening to. By now I've probably listened to this more than any other release from this year, which surely counts for something. A lot, perhaps most of my loyalty has resulted from the music, which is frequently excellent: I tossed off that Playhouse-meets-Areal comparison before, but you know that this is exactly the sort of thing I get all unnecessarily hot and bothered about. There's a satisfying bottom-heaviness to most of the grooves here, from the lurching and splurting disco of "Again" to the more urgent electro whines of "C'mon" and "Madonna" to almost Underworld-ish techno throb of "Underwater Kissing". It's not surprising that producer Lizer M shines most obviously when Barca takes a turn on the bench, and the three instrumental tracks are among the album's highlights: "Not Rock" in particular is the kind of all-embracing dance record you could imagine James Murphy making if he'd grown up in Berlin and never liked rock (who knows what relevance the title has in this regard), uniting stuttery early-nineties house-pop with apocalyptic acid peals and a chorus in the form of the most winsome, cute little electro riff ever (imagine an electro riff trying to be a lap dog). This is typical of his ADD-afflicted production approach, apt to pull in different directions simultaneously like siamese twins with no co-ordination.
This unstable identity is perhaps why the fusion of his grooves with Barca's songs finally does seem to work - at the end of the day any strict genre setting for either would seem arbitrary and confining. The Toni Halliday/Moloko analogies can be stretched far enough to suggest that twelve years ago the duo could have easily been making guitar rock, and six years ago just as easily trip-hop, and the record would be quite similar in feel. That said, I'm glad that they've decided to make More Equal Than Others now, with the sonic setting they've chosen: when it all comes together, as it does on the marvellous first single "Gone", it's difficult to imagine them doing anything else quite so successfully. "Gone" is house-pop par excellence, another lobby into the void stretching out beyond Cassius's "The Sound of Violence" marked "where to now for French house?" That record's answer was to emphasise the imbalances in what was by that point a very tried and tested sound. What's thrilling about "The Sound of Violence" is the yawning chasms between the shimmering guitar licks and that deep and deadly bassline. "Gone" edges out even further: the bass resembling the sluggish movements of a water-submerged and slumbering dinosaur, the all-encompassing rumblings of tectonic plate shifts; the disco guitar riffs work themselves into a dazzling coked-up frenzy; the xylophones and strings and chimes blur into an amorphous glow of palatial over-satiation, flushed with a fleshy pinkness. Meanwhile Barca is surprisingly straightforward and by-the-books in her story of irrational sexual desire: "When your gone I like the way you're walking, I like the way you act, I like the way you touch yourself. It's your smell that paralyse me, makes me forget myself." But if Princess Him are more macro than micro, it still shouldn't come as a surprise that what absolutely makes "Gone" their best song by a mile is a tiny little quirk in the groove, a whipcrack snare lashing out too soon in every fourth bar like a sudden foreshadowing of climax. A trick learnt from a dozen microhouse minimalists, it effortlessly propels "Gone" beyond sleekly appealing post-Frech House into a Frankenstein's Monster of brazen sexuality. Despite all the emoting on display, stylisation wins the day once again.
