Favourites From 2006

2006 was a pretty tough year for the DJ. There weren't really many records released that sounded fresh or different 100 other records one already has in one's crate. After a year of scouring the message boards, podcasts, and daily Juno emails, these are ten that caught my ear.

Sebastian Leger feat. Gia Mellish – Hypnotized (Royal Flush)

I’m not usually one for vocals, but, as you’ll soon see, this year I seem to be a sucker for the sound of a beautiful voice. Does that mean I’m getting old, I wonder? Dunno. What I do know is that Sebastian Leger has crafted a dirty little rump-shaker with Gia Mellish’s vocals over funky hand-claps, farty bassline and delayed synth wash. Good, solid electro-house with just a smidge of French luxuriance thrown in for good measure.

Emmanuel – Pretend (Beat Cult’s 6th Avenue Vocal) (white)

Ah, the analogue synth sound. Often overdone these days, but Beat Cult (whoever they are) keep it simple with just the vocal and that pulsing analogue-y synth sound. I especially like the “la-la-la”s in the break.

My Robot Friend – Rapture (Soma)

An odd little track, the lyrics consist of cut-and-paste syllables from type-and-speak software. This may seem gimmicky, but in fact it forces you listen more closely, piecing the puzzle together, trying to appreciate the bigger picture. I’m not usually one who pays attention to lyrics, so when a song forces me to do just that I consider it something of an achievement.

Ellen Allien & Apparat - Way Out (Bpitch Control)

The gloomy string sounds, grinding minimal bassline and guitar feedback would make for devastated dancefloors on their own; throw Ellen’s multi-tracked, delayed-to-distraction vocal on top and the track is elevated to the sublime. This should have been the song that broke minimal to the mainstream.

Trick & Kubic – Easy (Data)

Breathy, slightly European-accented vocals on the top and a groovy bassline thundering away underneath; it’s as simple as that. Lyrically, the track is somewhat trite in its belief that change (one’s life, the world) is easy, but when coupled with the uncomplicated groove, I can almost believe it.

Nelly Furtado – Maneater (Geffen)

The harmonies! The harmonies! Double, triple, octiple tracks of layered harmonies; it’s like a hip hop Bohemian Rhapsody in there. Timbaland works his magic with a less-is-more approach to the instrumental beneath Nelly’s phenomenal vocals. With little more than beats and bleeps as the undercarriage, those harmonies more than fill in the spaces.

Kelis feat. Too $hort – Bossy (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Earth Out Remix) (Virgin)

French label mates Alan Braxe and Fred Falke apparently have the same contempt for Kelis that I have. The remix dispenses with all but the breathy bits and then launches into the kind of old-school synth work-out that we’ve come to know and love from the French. Then they threw in a DJ E-Z-Rock-era “woo” sample on every other bar and voila! A masterpiece!

Pet Shop Boys – Psychological (Ewan Pearson Remix) (Parlophone)

The standout track on the excellent Fundamental gets a little help from the best remixer in the business. Pearson keeps the vocal, chucks the rest away, and comes up with a sinster (is that a harpsicord I hear?) acid monster that sounds straight out of a horror movie soundtrack. Danceable and yet even more menacing and unsettling that the original, it’s the best thing he’s done since "Strict Machine".

Alexkid – Nightshade (Rodriguez Junior Mix) (F Communications)

Alexkid seems to have a knack for pairing sparse acid sounds with female vocals. See 2003’s “Come With Me” and 2005’s “Don’t Hide It” for other stunning examples, which coincidentally also feature Lissette Alea, . I prefer this remix over the original only because Rodriguez Junior has added a few gently oscillating pads here and there, making it just a little sweeter.

Kleerup feat. Robyn – With Every Heartbeat (Risky Dazzle)

Is it my favourite because I just discovered it? Has the novelty yet to wear off? Maybe, but it’s one of those tracks that leaves you wishing there was more of it. Lots of low-end, melancholy pads, lush strings (Eat your heart out, Trevor Horn), earnest carpe-diem vocals…more, more, MORE!

And We’re Back!

Highly successful move to Saint John, New Brunswick. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, back to work.

I’m a big enough guy that I can admit when I’m wrong(ish). So, when Stylus lists Villalobos’ 37 minute Fizheuer Zieheuer at #36 in it’s Top 50 Singles of 2006, I guess I have to swallow and accept that it was a success after all. I personally can only listen to about 4 minutes of it before it pisses me off, but hey, that’s me. Individuals far more eminent than me love it to death.

I also question the inclusion of the Clipse yawner “Mr. Me Too” at the #38 position. I know there are people who hail this as some kind of new standard, but I don’t understand why. After repeated listens all I get from it is hookless, drug-dealing slang. I think being from white, rural Canada means I will just never fully appreciate the darker side of the urban, black experience.

If there is a diamond in the rough (relatively speaking) on that list, it has to be Kleerup’s “With Every Heartbeat” (#27). I totally missed this 7” slice of disco genius despite all the time I spend reading/listening on blogs, messageboards, and podcasts. As far as I can tell it came out of nowhere, passed everybody by, and then made the Stylus Top 50. I’ll tell you this: my copy is going to be devastating dance floors in the very near future. I mean, what kind of sad indie-bastard would you have to be to not love it? I submit that you would have to be a great deal of all three.

Moving...

Lots on the back burner, but I'm in the process of changing cities. Check back soon.

A long and progressive road...

A fascinating article by Philip Sherburne over at Pitchfork on track times and their possible heraldic properties. Mr. Sherburne’s column “The Month In Techno” is truthfully the only thing I regularly read at Pitchfork. He really seems to have his thumb on the pulses of scenes on both sides of the pond, not to mention that he’s a great writer. Ordinarily he's spot on with his reviews of records, performances and whole scenes, although I really think he’s missed the mark ever so slightly with this one.

As Mr. Sherburne pointed out about halfway through the piece, extended track times are nothing new in dance music. The original 12” version of disco classic “I Will Survive”, one of the (if not THE) most recognizable disco tracks of all time, lists a running time of 8:02. Acid house standards like Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Jack Your Body” and Jamie Principle’s “Your Love” both clock in at over 6 minutes. Even radio-ready stadium techno the likes of Underworld’s “Born Slippy.NUXX” (9:44) and The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People” (6:28) tend to sprawl a bit, although both tracks were issued hideously executed “edits” that were little more than fades at the break. Long tracks are the rule in dance music, rather than the exception. Villalobos’ proposed 44 minute single, though, takes the standard 10 minute extended mix, turns it on its head and kicks it in the crotch.

Mr. Sherburne proposes three possible reasons for such dramatic jumps in track times; firstly that due to the extended lengths of parties, tracks are being extended in a proportional manner; secondly that the relatively new digital media are allowing electronic artists the freedom to expand and fill said media with sound; and, finally that laptop sets are allowing DJs to test unfinished tracks, thereby introducing a degree of improvisation. Each of these reasons is equally plausible, and the reader can definitely see the logic underlying Mr. Sherburne’s conclusions. I find it interesting, and a little worrying, that only reasons indicating the growth of the minimal techno aesthetic have been presented. I would presume to suggest a forth, not-so-positive suggestion.

I should preface this by pointing out that I am mostly not a fan of Kompakt/Perlon/Get Physical/Bpitch/Systematic/Areal minimal techno. I say mostly because whenever I come across a release by any of these labels I feel compelled to listen in the hope that I will like it. Sometimes I do, but mostly they go back in the rack. I can quite understand why the music press likened the work of these labels and their associated artists to the minimalist works of Frank Stella, Samuel Beckett, Carl Andre, and Robert Bresson. The music is stripped down to little more than percussion or a single looped phrase, a single element of which is then varied ad infinitum, and in my case, ad nauseum. The good stuff develops an infectious groove that changes just enough to keep the listener interested while managing to maintain the repetitiveness that keeps things…well…groovy. Unfortunately, the tracks that achieve this delicate balance are few and far between. I can’t really explain why the vast majority of these tracks don’t appeal to me other than to say that I find the majority of them too…tasteful. They’re like of-the-moment audio wallpaper; like Eno/Orb ambient for the new millennium.

When I read in Mr. Sherburne’s column that Ricardo Villalobos is contemplating releasing a 44 minute single and Perlon’s Sammy D is playing bits of some 20 minute opus out at parties, I immediately flashed back to when I first heard Goldie’s hour-long abortion “Mother”. I wrote in an earlier post about defining moments; “Mother” was, for me at least, the death knell of jungle/drum ‘n’ bass. After that every thing with an Amen-derivative break sounded pretentious and vain. It wasn’t until I read Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstasy almost a year later that I had any kind of inkling as to why that was. It was that drive towards the “progressive” ("intelligent" is the word that Mr. Reynolds favors), that need for deeper meaning in the music in lieu of visceral reaction to it, that had precipitated the release of “Mother” and eventually leached the vibrance from drum ‘n’ bass. Of course, Mr. Reynolds saw the signs earlier (as detailed in the book) but the end effect was the same. After reliving the horror, I started to wonder if 44 minutes of Villalobos is going to sound like 10 minutes of passable minimal techno bloated with 34 minutes of "progressive" self-importance.

Has minimal techno, by all accounts a vibrant and exciting scene, been bitten by the progressive bug? I sincerely hope not. As I said earlier, Mr. Sherburne has immersed himself in the scene and he knows far more about it than I do, but where he sees manipulation of new media, I see the studio gimmickery and mellotron noodlings of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Pink Floyd and their ilk. Where he sees the infinite possibilities for improvisational sound manipulation, I see that scene in “This Is Spinal Tap” where the band takes the stage at a festival, minus guitarist Nigel Tufnel. “We’re not about to do a free-form jazz , uh, exploration in front of a festival crowd, are we?” asks bassist Derek Smalls. They did and hilarity ensued. Let’s hope that a half-hour minimal techno track doesn’t become it’s own joke.

Fundamentalist

My name is John and I am a Pet Shop Boys fan.

I have been a Pet Shop Boys fan since I saw the video for "Always On My Mind" on CBC’s “Video Hits” in late 1985. My first CD (and what a CD!) was their 1990 album Behaviour. I still listen to it today. My first 12” single (bearing in mind the decline of vinyl on this side of the pond) was a promo-punched copy of Se a Vida É (That's The Way Life Is) coloured vinyl (lime green and lemon yellow) double-pack procured [ahem] from my university’s radio station archives. It was a turning point. Up until that moment I was strictly a CD-track-to-track DJ, slavishly seeking CD singles, lusting after the unreleased tracks and remixes, combing Usenet listings and mail order catalogues for that elusive German remix EP or Japanese four-track promotional CD3. Of course I knew of the existence of 12” singles, but, having grown up more with 8-tracks and cassettes, I viewed records as curiousity rather than a viable media alternative. Within a month of liberating [ahem] that doublepack I had a belt-drive turntable, purchased for a mere $20 from an electronics repair shop down the street from my apartment, and was playing the hell out of whatever wax I could lay my hands on. Within a year I had two Technics 1200s, albeit second-hand, and a cheap three-channel mixer. I often think back to when that double-pack landed in my lap, particularly while surveying my record collection, and it can only be described as one of those defining moments after which everything is different. In my case life split into Before-Vinyl and After-Vinyl and the pursuit of good, often obscure, records has become less a hobby and more an obsession. I no longer have much interest in the CD singles, but I’d step over my own mother for that Relentless triple-pack.

So you can imagine my excitement when the Pet Shop Boys' new album Fundamental practically leapt into my hands as I idly thumbed through the Pop/Rock rack at our local HMV. Once ensconced in the car on my hour-long commute home, I popped my shiny new CD into the stereo, prepared to bask in the glory that is 80's inflected electro-pop.

Boy was I surprised.

Fundamental opens with the dark and disturbing "Psychological", a haunting electro-house track with lyrics that are simultaneously nonsensical and evocative. "There's something in the attic/ And it smells so bad./ An Undertaker/ in a bowler hat./ (Psychological) / What's that spilt/ on the kitchen floor?/ Who's that banging/ on the cellar door?" sings frontman Neil Tennant as partner Chris Lowe's bassline grinds above ghostly groans . These lyrics, little more than disjointed phrases, suggest powerful and unsettling images and are the perfect precursor to the rest of the record.

Fundamental seems to be predominantly a response to the political climate both in the UK and Europe in much the same way Green Day's "American Idiot" was a response, although less subtle, to the political landscape of the good ol' US of A. The first single "I'm With Stupid" details British Prime Minister Tony Blair's fictitious doubts over Britain's alliance with the US in Iraq; "The Sodom & Gomorrah Show" describes a rural resident's first exposure to an Amsterdam or Ibiza-like world of sex, drugs, and dancing; the ballad "Luna Park" drips with bile over the Millennium Dome fiasco and an expected electoral backlash that never quite materialized. Stomper "Integral", a track reminiscent of the Boys' hit "Go West", anchors the record. A song about hard-line anti-terrorist surveillance policies put forth by Britain’s Labour government, it's the one track on the album that noticeably presents the rage and disgust Neil and Chris must be feeling with Blair and his supporters. As both pop song and political diatribe, "Integral" works in a way few songs have and is the most likely to draw the "American Idiot" comparison.

With Trevor Horn sitting in the producer’s chair again (he produced “Left To My Own Devices“ and “It’s Alright” from 1988’s Introspective) Fundamental is a lush record packed with all those little Horn-y flourishes. Sweeping strings flow in and out, over and under Art Of Noise bleeps and buzzes. It’s the kind of ear-candy that keeps a song fresh even when you know the words by heart and Horn is a master at it. “Left To My Own Devices” still sounds good, and I’m pretty sure Fundamental’s highlights will have equal staying power.

Having said all that, Fundamental is not a perfect record. The saccharine Release-reject "I Made My Excuses And Left" is glaringly out of sync thematically with the rest of the CD and its inclusion is a mystery to me. The Diane Warren ballad "Numb" is also a misstep, although given it's recent inclusion in the farewell-England world-cup montage it is destined to become a classic. These two tracks are the most typical of the Pet Shop Boys output and perhaps that's why I like them the least.

Happily, at least for me, Fundamental sounds like a Pet Shop Boys album without sounding too much like a Pet Shop Boys album. Put another way, Tennant, Lowe, and Horn have managed to craft a thoughtful and emotional record, while retaining their twin signatures of electro-pop and wry, tongue-in-cheek lyrics. It's a combination that has served them well in the past and continues to serve them on Fundamental. I mean, when an album has a song on it called “Minimal”, which describes all things minimal and sounds anything but minimal (Horn strings, hello!) it’s the kind of delicious irony that can only be the Pet Shop Boys. Who says pop never lasts, anyway?

Patience

Coming soon