You, Tim, 2009

Let's do this.

Paramore - Misguided Ghosts
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qkirsr

I love Paramore for their uncomplicated jaggedness, the way their songs seem to bounce so effectively from riff to drum fill to singer Hayley Williams' slightly snotty vocals like they're levitating - if Paramore are emo-pop at its most radio-friendly and slick in the same way that Garbage (initially) were grunge-pop at its most radio-friendly and slick, what both also share is that marvelous sense of craft, their best works absolute joys to behold. In this sense, the most wonderfully Paramore track on their new album is the single "Ignorance", which races through its pose of jaded disappointment with such deliciously mounting anticipation I have to engage in fistpumps as I listen to it on headphones while walking home - plus, it has, like, three choruses.

Meanwhile the best moment on Brand New Eyes is the bit on "Where The Lines Overlap" when the music falls away and Hayley sings "Well I've got a feeling if I sing this loud enough / you would sing it back to me" like she's teaching the world to sing. Although "Misery Business" may be their signature song, Paramore aren't really all that sad: Hayley's lyrics, which frequently impress me, seem to vent her impatience with fools more than anything else, and much of this album possesses a giddy sense of optimism, an unabashed joy at the prospect of being in a successful pop band. They're anthem writers, pure and simple.

But my favourite song on Brand New Eyes is in fact the acoustic ballad "Misguided Ghosts", which doesn't really make sense given how weighted towards punchiness the band's talents are. Maybe it's a bit like with Ashlee Simpson's I Am Me, where the ballad "Say Goodbye" took on a special lustre by virtue of its point of difference. And how different: a simply beautfiul vulnerable vocal performance over impossibly warm guitar, "Misguided Ghosts" was even compared to Joanna Newsom of all people on an ILX thread. Its simplicity allows the lyrics to jump out at you, and I adore them, though am hard-pressed to say why exactly. It might be that mixture of clarity and inscrutability: "So now I'm told that this is life / and pain is just a simple compromise / so we can get what we want out of it. / Would someone care to classify / our broken hearts, our twisted minds, so I / can find someone to rely on..." Hayley's singing here is perfect, expressive but unselfconsciously so, perfectly balanced between clear and trembling. Almost imperceptibly a thrumming kickdrum emerges to give the song a sense of gliding restlessness, the compulsive drift of Hayley's misguided ghost whose lesson is less "be yourself" and more "we are all equally lost".

The pain of adolescence, the sense of a void at the heart of identity and the desire to quench it with romance, forms an endless spring for fantastic pop music because we never quite recover ourselves. "Our suffering was pointless" we think later, but no-one gets the chance to go back and explain that to our younger selves. But we can listen to songs like this instead.

STOKED

All I have to do today is figure out a way to insulate my windows against draughts and WAIT IMPATIENTLY FOR TIM'S NEXT POST

STOKED

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 9 December 2009 11:32 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm so happy you're back Tim.

YAY to this thread and THIS!

Baby Dollz - My Cookie (Boys In The Skinny Jeans)
http://c.wrzuta.pl/wa6652/8462d97c001d02974afefda7/0/baby%20dollz%20-%20my%20cookie.mp3

"My Cookie" is possibly fake-jerk: the video clip is a bit too slick for this stage of the sub-genre's commercial evolution, the Baby Dollz themselves just a little too pretty (though one rather endearingly sports braces in the clip), especially when compared to the erm honesty of presentation that is often one of jerk's more refreshing qualities. And of course, it's a big, bold, catchy pop song. Smells like someone jumping on a crossover phenonemon in the hope of easy cash?

But what would fake-jerk be, precisely? If this umpteenth reiteration of old-skool minimal beats is distinguished by its fashions (see the title in parentheses to this track), its slight kiddie vibe and the high quotient of rudimentary pubescent female rapping, it's not clear what line of authenticity Baby Dollz could possibly fall on the wrong side of. Anyway, these girls are just awesome, packing in one of my favourite lines of the year ("His skin is like a job, make a chick go to work!") within moments of starting. And that beat: as if the standard doom-bass section wasn't resounding enough, the groove intermittently flips into a rattling steel percussion counter-rhythm that feels like it's being played against the inside of your skull. This is one way in which the minimalism of styles like hyphy and jerk can be liberating, setting up a space in which the contrast of just a handful of musical ideas can sound really effective. There's few if any grooves from this year that sounded as startling, memorable or distinct as this did for me, which might seem a surprising outcome given how "template" based jerk appears at first glance (it shouldn't be though - jerk through up a whole bunch of my favourite rap tracks this year, and several are still to come).

Moreover, while some people might mark the song down for being a tribute to boys in the skinny jeans, this simply makes me love it more - although less because I like skinny jeans and more because I highly approve of songs about boys in anything at all really.

Dotstar - Stick Up
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jcms37

Most UK Funky "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 silly 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 - though this may be because it's almost more of a singalong tune than a dancealong tune; I've found myself singing "all the girls in the club want to hold me for ransom / 'cos I'm young and I'm fly and they think that i'm handsome" in the most inappropriate locations.

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 so much like Green Velvet.

yah i love that song

^^^

this is the real end-of-year list highlight

bookmarked

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 there's one thing that is almost guaranteed to get you a UK hit it's hitching your sound to a sample from a massive late 90s pop trance track.

this is the real end-of-year list highlight

Yup.

i too enjoy the music of Dotstar

to expand on that a little, i was thinking why do i like 'Stick Up' and not a lot of other similar stuff (i don't like most of the big 'skank' tracks) but it probably does come down to the vocal effect and his tone - not necessarily cold but yeah kinda monotonous and machine-like in a way that still compels - which combined with the aforementioned visual impact just gives the good-but-anonymous instrumental an edge over others.

BOYS IN THE SKINNY JEANZ DO THE REJECT.

Which is to say...Finney raising the bar for all of our end of year efforts.

Natasha Bedingfield vs Chicane - Bruised Water (Michael Woods Radio Edit)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/f7p5cb

I don't tend to like an awful amount of airy trance-pop that gets released these days. This was not always the case. In 1999 (the time of the last proper pop-trance boom, or "euro" as it is sometimes called to distinguish it from, um, serious trance I guess) I was 17 and going through that painful process of self-identification that involves disliking more things than you like. At the time I was not in a position truly to appreciate the carnival of delights on offer, although let us be honest for a moment, Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone" was good for nothing except providing raw material for Wiz Khalifa many years later.

In 2000 though I was seduced by the trembling delights of Fragma's "Toca's Miracle", which has to be one of the finest office Christmas party songs ever. The secret is to be drunk AND the best dancer in the room. At this point the tune is not merely great (as usual), but possibly the single most important cultural event in world history.

There have been other highs: any trancey cover of a Bryan Adams tune is sure to astonish, but the ecstatic "Boys of Summer" is a favourite of mine. Along similar lines, I have a sneaking affection for Bryan's work on Chicane's "Don't Give Up". But the last few years have seen a decrease in the volume of fine trance-pop being produced, if only for the simple reason that many producers have switched over to (often dire) commercial electro-house efforts with bad faux-rock vocals. This is a trend that has to be killed BTW.

So it's rather lovely to discover this number, which not only recalls everything that was great about the decidedly more innocent, more sincere-sounding golden age of trance-pop at its best, but also learns a few tricks from bouncy electro-house opportunism. Nominally, this is a bootleg of Chicane's late 90s anthem "Saltwater" (which I'm not hugely into in its original form - a bit too earnestly ethereal perhaps?) crossed with the vocals of Natasha Bedingfield's decent and largely forgotten ballad "I Bruise Easily". Turns out Bedingfield is an excellent trance vocalist, her squeaky clean whiter-than-white vocals capturing that sense of soaring fragility that trance has cornered perhaps uniquely (it is of course rather odd to soar in a fragile manner). Although I'm not sure if trance-pop versions of "These Words" or "I Wanna Have Your Baby" are in the offing. Additionally, the tinge of euphoria that the trance backing gives to Natasha's melancholy vocals and lyrics create an interestingly conflicted air of emotional largesse that compares favourably to Sugababes at their mid-period best - think "Million Different Ways" or "Ace Reject" (AKA one of the greatest pop songs of recent years).

Having said this, you can skip the actual bootleg and head straight for the much more popular Michael Woods Edit, which includes all the rushy lost-at-sea synth work of "Saltwater" but adds a few tricks of its own. Specifically, at about one minute in, the tune breaks down into a hectic, nervous bouncing trebly synth riff groove that sounds like Fedde Le Grand on a good deal more ecstasy. I love this idea: so much actual commercial electro-house is cynically tied up in an air of can't-be-fucked half-arsery, all jaded female monologues (Vandalism, I'm looking at you) and only fitfully energetic grooves (Le Grand's "Let Me Think About It" and Axwell's "I Found U" as the last truly great commercial electro-house numbers: Discuss) - as if they can preemptively explain away audience indifference with a wave of the hand, "oh, we weren't really trying to be liked anyway." See also: The Ting Tings, and all who follow in their dispirited and dispiriting footsteps.

Michael Woods understands that the specific sounds of commercial electro-house (in particular post-"Put Your Hands Up For Detroit" bounciness) are still viable, just as trance riffs are viable. What was required was an urgent injection of sincerity and commitment: a sense that this music can still be affective (and so effective) emotionally. On his edit of "Bruised Water", electro-house's still occasionally infectious sense of druggy energy and groove-friction are put in the service of a broader and more timeless vision of dance-pop architecture, and with a single sigh from Natasha it is as if all those disaffected sneers have been replaced with glittering tears.

Florence + The Machine - You've Got The Love (XX Remix)
http://www.mediafire.com/?jodztvfd1nm

I've only very recently come around to the XX album in a massive way, while convalescing in hospital in fact. I think for a while I held against them that they were much more reserved and conservative sounding (especially the way they hold to the guitar/bass/drums format) than the breathless press analogies had led me to believe, but of course this is a silly thing to hold against a band, and I later realised that what I took for caution was rather a certain... deliberateness. Just as the group's female singer seems to perform her vocals with a reserved and paced sense of intentionality and thoughtfulness that immediately makes me flash on Insides' Kirsty Yates, songs like "Heart Skipped A Beat", "Shelter" and "Infinity" are precisely as widescreen, as unpredictable and as expressive as they need to be, no more and no less.

Still, it's nice to find that bandmember Jamie's remixes stray from the beaten path a bit: his remixes of Jack Penate's "Pull My Heart Away" and the XX's own "Basic Space" draw from dubstep's high-tech isolationism (clanking beats, lugubrious rubbery textures) without actually being dubstep per se. In fact I'm put in mind of experimental 90s art-pop such as, well, Insides, but also Laika. The band's remix of Florence + the Machine's cover of "You've Got The Love" is a bit different, partly in that it's explicitly a "2-step remix" (of all things), but mostly because it ends up being a cover of the cover, with the XX themselves redoing the bulk of the vocals and Florence herself only appearing in fleeting, chimerical form.

Announcing itself with rippling harp, a shiver of chimes and a fitful, rudimentary stop-start 2-step beat, "You've Got The Love" is both prettier and more physical than anything on the XX's album, and more wide-ranging too, though it also feels just a bit more haphazard and less "perfect" maybe. This seems a more than fair trade to me, especially since any retreat from the studied flawlessness of the album tracks is in relative terms only. Plus the music here is simply fabulous, its thrilling and surprising collision between delicacy and darkness recalling (perhaps deliberately) MJ Cole's Y2K remix of his own "Sincere". In both the evocations of class and refinement become... not unambiguously ghostly, but unreal-seeming and out-of-joint, like the bar scenes in The Shining, and yet somehow rendered stronger and more substantial by the eruptions of booming bass. And the bass here, sometimes underscoring the ostentatious prettiness above it, sometimes shaking ominously by itself, is pretty astonishing, its baleful rumblings putting me in mind of a gigantic worm questing sightlessly for the surface.

The XX's traded vocals are on the more relaxed end of their style, especially the female singer, who sounds as if she's just been woken up and had a microphone put in her face. I don't tend to approve of simple/plaintive/unadorned indie reimaginings of diva performances, but the air of domesticity that fills the duo's mutual pledge "you've got the love I need to see me through" gets a free pass, perhaps because this song is now old enough that recasting it has little if any irony factor, and perhaps because the XX seem to have such great taste in pop music that I mentally exclude the sneer I might otherwise read into this performance. And perhaps because the lyrics are so well suited to a more homely pledge of devotion. At any rate the drama which the XX's own performances exclude come rushing in with a section devoted to chopping up Florence's histrionic cyber-diva vocals over a riotous snare pattern that shocks me with its brute physicality, the effect coming on like a rococo, vaguely sickly-feeleing Sunship. The XX let Florence - and the beat - do the sort of expressive emoting that they deny themselves, Florence's swooping "yo-ou kno-ow it's REALLLLLL!" and the energetic-ecstatic beat revealing the fluttery heart palpitations concealed by the XX's shy smiles.

although let us be honest for a moment, Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone" was good for nothing except providing raw material for Wiz Khalifa many years later.

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f14/snouts/6fc0bcacc4c6a970ccd3e7b7d1ea1445.gif

Wow you disagree with me that much?!?

Awesome avatar for me btw.

i know rite.

tend not to bust humorous gifs when consumed by righteous fury btw, although yes i will ride for alice deejay vs wiz khalifa any day.

while convalescing in hospital in fact

Nothing serious, I hope (I'm not on here much, so am out of touch). Anyway, enjoying this thread so far. Guess I'm going to have to go and listen to FAT Em now...

the xx remix is great precisely because it has effectively nothing to do w/florence - agree w/tim on the jamie xx remix of "basic space", loads better than the original!

don't care for either alice deejay or wiz khalifa tbh

Permission requested to use that gif on King Boy Pato at some point.

(Would it be churlish to point out that Boys of Summer is by Don Henley rather than Bryan Adams?)

I think I just worded that confusingly Matt - obv "Heaven" is the Adams cover.

I think working at a 24 hour cinema at Crown Casino during 1998-2001 turned me against quite a few of the trance-pop hits of the day, but in particular "Better Off Alone", which used to pipe out of a gruesome arcade game cum adult bar venue next door at 4am without fail. Somehow I was able later to forgive tunes like "Can't Get Enough", but not "Better Off Alone".

i remember loads of really great pop-trance tracks from that period though - sonique's "it feels so good", fragma's "toca's miracle", roger sanchez's "another chance"...idk "better off alone" always seemed tinny and annoying to me.

<3 wiz khalifa

i remember loads of really great pop-trance tracks from that period though - sonique's "it feels so good", fragma's "toca's miracle", roger sanchez's "another chance"...idk "better off alone" always seemed tinny and annoying to me.

These are all great! though in my head the sanchez is pegged as filter-house?

Anyway people download "Bruised Water" and tell me what you think eh.

any dance track that goes top 10 gets filed as "commercial dance" in my mind. rui da silva's "touch me" too - all of these needed to be exhumed by rappers last year but never were

permission most decidedly granted re kbp.

i think the xx remix does have something to do with florence actually - the unexpected charm of the thing is in how that sort of 6th-cup-of-tea-today domestic comfort tim's talking about undercuts both 'you got the love's original power AND its tedious halflife as a cliche indiedance cover curveball, rinsed by postrave chillout compilation clubbers and zane lowe/annie mac and whatever. (ie i disagree there's no grand irony at play here, even though the xx might be being perfectly sincere about it for all one knows.) it's this extra involvement of a sense of the actual functional day-to-day life of this sort of tune with its listeners that allows it to escape it either being a cute-but-pointless-pr-stunt (if they'd remixed something more connoisseurial instead) or an idiotically bovine la roux/skream affair.

yeah lex i kinda figured you wouldn't be an alice deejay fan, being the noted enemy of the tinny and annoying that you are and all.

I'd like to hear someone, possibly a grime MC, take on Sandstorm by Darude.

The chopped up, whooping Florence sample is the single best thing about that XX remix - it gives it the ravey feel that the original lacked. I'm not sure about the remix in general though - call me a traditionalist bore but I generally like my basslines to be in the same key as the rest of the track.

the fake blood remix of sandstorm is, frankly, utterly amazing. i shit u not

Royal P - Between Us
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0zgkfd

One of the loveliest, and certainly most startling UK Funky tracks this year, "Between Us" simultaneously renders unclear the meaning of funky and provides a glimpse of just how far the genre can go. With its unsettled, cluttered, fluttering beat (but none of the usual Caribbean counter-rhythms), warm Mr Fingers bassline and stomach-butterfly synthesiser arpeggios, "Between Us" pinpoints a specific vibe peculiar in pop and dance music both: a sense of being seduced against your will, being sucked into a languorous pool of desire that you're trying to fight.

The deep female vocal, cut-up to make very little sense, seems (upon careful reverse engineering) to be a promise that nothing will come between the singer and her music. But if sense is already lost, has something already disrupted the relationship? More likely, "Between Us" provides the location of a mind so lost in the music's twists and turns that sense itself can't come between. In one particularly startling moment the shattered vocals intone what feels like an eerie statement of compulsive desire for "music/ah!/music/LOVE/for my/music/that I have for my/music/that I have for my/music/that I have for my..."

Royal P's beat - as nuanced as any R&B production, the firm 4X4 kickdrum notwithstanding - and febrile synthesiser melodies suggest that the relationship ultimately could be damaging, unhealthy: the singer is too close to her object of desire, too much in love with its slinky perfection, and Royal P's counterpoint melodies seem to mock her with their dark dolorousness, before going all chilly and defeated and soft-focus at the end, like Boards of Canada soundtracking a funeral, acknowledging that it's too late for the singer ever to find her way back. "It puts a smile on my face" she mutters, exhausted, but addicts will come up with any excuse.

^^track of the thread so far, yes!

way better than boreds of canada though

Tim - have you checked out any post-Deadmau5 progressive? that's where i go for my trance fix nowadays, with all the pretty melodies intact but at a more humane tempo, and it can get very poppy on occasion too... as for recent-ish ethereal trance proper, here's some lovely Dido-trance with a 2-steppy feel.

Le Grand's "Let Me Think About It" and Axwell's "I Found U" as the last truly great commercial electro-house numbers: Discuss

what i find interesting about the second, commercial wave of electro-house is that it simultaneously got more girly and more blokey than the '04 og... compared to something like Klaas' "Infinity 2008", with its beery riff and its swing-levels ratcheted up as high as they can go without the groove starting to trip over itself, early Get Physical et al sounds not only positively androgynous but also somewhat... y'know, funkless! and while i agree that electro-house in any form is pretty much played out at this point (and the general public increasingly does too, i guess), i think there's still some mileage left in edging ever closer to fruity euro-dance - so i'd say that the last great commercial electro-house number (so far) was released just a few months ago.

'between us' = kinda reminiscent of boy better know's tropical, in its same preternaturally unknowable, almost voidlike compulsion. also very different though.

thirsty... so thirsty

Fool's Gold - Yam Lo Moshech
http://www.sendspace.com/file/e2q2m9

I don't mind US indie being so fanboyish about Animal Collective, not just because I like Animal Collective, but also because I think in the choice between "indie that wants to be experimental and playful with genre" and "indie as the keeper of rock's eternal flame" I'm more partial to the former, regardless of whether the music is living up to either precept half the time. Don't get me wrong, I liked The Strokes' debut album as much as the next person, but even so, the current meaning of "indie" seems more likely to throw up inspired accidents - anomalies that go halfway toward justifying indie's entire raison d'être - than it has in quite a while.

Fool's Gold I literally stumbled across by accident, downloading one of their songs - this one in fact - by mistake. But happily they satisfy a yearning I didn't know, and never would I have guessed I had. That yearning is for percussive psychedelic kraut-cum-world-pop somewhere between 'Soon Over Babaluma' and 'Remain In Light', only with marvelously heartfelt Hebrew vocals. I'm ignorant enough of jewish language and culture that anyone singing in Hebrew just spells "devotional" to me, with an ease that would be impossible in English short of, like, Gregorian chanting or some such. Or maybe it's just the preponderance of guttural consonants that makes Fool's Gold sound so mystical - singing in Russian probably would have the same effect for me.

Or maybe it's the music itself, which, like the singer's vertiginous vocal leaps, always sounds awed, bedazzled, almost exhausted by visions of light and majesty. 'Yam Lo Moshech' skips along on a repetitive, massive snare, enormous horns and psychedelic Santana guitar solos transmitted from the end of the universe, while the singer sighs like Moses staggering down Mt Sinai weighed down by stone tablets - forgive my blatant cultural/religious cliches, but this is the great advantage of coming to music such as this with pretty much zero appropriate knowledge or sensitivity - you can imagine everything writ as large as possible. And anyway, Fool's Gold are totes gettting off on the cross-cultural collisions in their music (hints of Africa, of Indonesia, of Turkey, all wrapped up in Hebrew singing like a bow round a particularly haphazard Christmas hamper), so why shouldn't I.

You need the entire album - the lovestruck shimmer of "Nadine", the heatstroke hallucinations of "Ha Dvash", the gamelan rattle of "Momentary Shelter" - but I particularly like the structure of "Yam Lo Moshech", the way it just drives on its beat from start to finish without deviation, growing ever more topheavy and histrionic and overblown, always finding a way to make overripe psychedelia and circular rhythmic dances feel like the same thing. Too many assume you can have one only at the expense of the other. This is a charming exception.

Ryan Leslie - Gibberish
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fck448

I'm not a massive fan of Ryan Leslie's album, but then I guess I didn't really give it a chance: on the first few listens too many of the tunes sounded like also-ran Neptunes-productions, and I just haven't cared enough to go back. Maybe I should: Ryan Leslie, of course, was the brains behind the music on Cassie's debut album, which of course is totally classic. But - whether because Ryan ain't Cassie or for some other reason beyond my ken - I'm happier to wait for Cassie's endlessly delayed, endlessly revised second album.

The stronger reason to give Ryan a second chance is "Gibberish", the closing track on his album and one of my absolute favourite tracks of the year. Things start off genteel: soothing piano chords, stately bassline, gentle fingerclick percussion. Then Ryan, his voice wounded and mutilated by autotune - but slightly, subtly, plastic surgery scars rather than the elaborate bodysculpting of T-Pain - sounding frustrated and pissed off, "Time is running out! Please don't make me wait! I don't wanna know! I'll stab a day..." Sure, those lyrics don't really make sense, but it hardly matters, because after that I can decipher hardly anything else on this song. The bridge, whispered and sighed over smart sixties horns, seems to be: "Oh didnyknow, ohdidyknowabehh, oh didnyknow, ohdidyknowabehheberyday, eberyday..." And then, suddenly, clarity: "Your body's everything! Everything! Everhebehh ehh... oh.... I see your body when you rock in the moonlight..." and then he's off again, lost in his own world of incomprehensible mewling.

"Gibberish" is a gimmick track of course, but one with a point: so much pop music focuses on the sense of absolute self-abasement and loss of control inspired by the desire for another, but it does so in a hyper-articulate, self-controlled manner. With "Gibberish" Ryan tries to show, rather than tell: there's not enough explicable sentences here to tell a story, but Ryan's constant drift into intelligibility captures perfectly the kind of distracted reverie whereby the most inane of details (your body rocking in the moonlight) takes on the air of the sacred, something beyond words but not beyond pathetic mumbling. "Gibberish" gets at the inescapable silliness of desire in a way that most R&B is too accomplished to countenance.

To say NOTHING of the awesome falsetto, piano tinkles and distinguished synth sweeps in the chorus.

Major Notes - Holy Ghost
http://www.sendspace.com/file/g9vr1e

The Major Notes production I really want to give you is the guy's remix of J-Will's "Deja Vu" - an R&B/funky fusion whose awesomely tactile sonics and febrile menace put me in mind of Adamski's "Killer" - but unfortunately I've been unable to find a copy for love nor money. "Holy Ghost" will have to suffice, though it's seriously underselling this great track to describe it as "sufficient". Major Notes does a lot of different spins on the funky template (see "Friend of Mine" for a gorgeous piece of classy R&B-tinged vocal house); "Holy Ghost" is something of a superior follow-up to the widescreen, complex rhythms of "Jungle Book" only here the template is pushed about as far into "tribal" territory as it can possibly go: deep resonant kicks not following anything like a 4X4 pattern, around which he weaves a series of grunts and vocal samples "oh ah! oh! ah! oh", "oh meh!" and the like, and of course, a sighing Chorus "aaahaaaaahaaaahaaaahaaah" under a blizzard of heavy kicks - this is serious virgin sacrifice in the jungle bizniz.

I love the nuance of Major Notes' drums, which can be naturalist or antinaturalist but always have a delicious heaviness to them - on "Deja Vu" the beat at the end of each measure sounds somewhere between an explosion and a grave being exhumed. On his nearly as excellent remix of Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" the contrast between the steady kicks, the crisp snares and the hectic sampled woodblocks is simply delightful. On "Jungle Book" he pitch-shifted the kicks so they sounded like they were tumbling down a stairwell. On "Holy Ghost" the beats can sound metallic or wooden or a dozen points in between, each delectable enough that you could listen to a single bar forever.

But the best part of "Holy Ghost" is the surprise ending, when a wobbly baritone declaims, "Can you feel the holy ghost?" Cue Chorus: "Coming down!" Baritone: "Coming down! Coming down Coming down! Do you feel the holy ghost?" Chorus: "Way Way down!!!" Baritone: "Deep down inside ! Deep down inside! Deep down insiiiiide your soulllll soulllll soulllllll soulllll your soulll soullll soulll..." I can only imagine the destruction this causes on the dancefloor.

you liked the strokes????!!! :(

Lex I think you'll find that most of ILX's pop listeners liked The Strokes!

what's the fool's gold album called? i keep finding stone roses references, and a record label.

Lex I think you'll find that most of ILX's pop listeners liked The Strokes!

:(

"indie that wants to be experimental and playful with genre" and "indie as the keeper of rock's eternal flame"

when i like indie, it tends not to be based on this binary but whether there's a strong individual voice coming through - a santogold or karen o, who are both "experimental" to an extent but not so much that it's the focus of their music. any time i see an indie band being hyped as "playing with genre" it's like a massive neon warning sign to get away from them now

because indie acts tend to play with genre like toddlers play with paint

and worse would consider that a compliment :(

lol santogold

when i like indie, it tends not to be based on this binary but whether there's a strong individual voice coming through

This is kind of a truism though Lex. You could say it about any genre that pushes personas, including a genre relatively more comfortable with formula such as R&B. "When I like indie, I like the good stuff."

The binary I posit upthread is more in terms of how the genre sees itself as a whole stylistically - obv. indie always also sees itself as being about strong individual voices, but lives up to this even less than it does any other self-description.

because indie acts tend to play with genre like toddlers play with paint

This sounds more true than it is, I think. Of course I mostly don't approve of the kind of free-for-all eclecticism that you're evoking here, but I think indie by and large is characterised by the same dynamics of restriction and looseness as any other genre (for good and often for ill - most "experimental" indie albums are much less wide-ranging than sympathetic reviews make them sound). Even groups that superficially appear to have a broad sonic palette - say, Yeasayer - turn out to be quite circumscribed once you get over the "woah squiggly sounds" moment.

Rudenko - Everybody (Fingaprint Remix)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/wo9otn

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.

There's a bit in that Rudeno/Fingaprint track where I'm almost positive there's a Timbaland sample. Something from the "This is Not a Test!" album, but I can't identify it.

tim that major notes track is incredible, idk how i managed to avoid hearing it this year. i love the way he spells his name "major not£$"

i appear to have acquired a remix of beyoncé's "sweet dreams" by him at some point too, it's not that great though

I think pretty much everyone this decade from Timbaland onwards has played with genres like toddlers play with paint. That's part of the hit-and-miss fun of it all but I'm sure someone who was deeply into the tabla would level that exact same criticism at Get Yr Freak On.

<3 <3 <3
this is great

I think pretty much everyone this decade from Timbaland onwards has played with genres like toddlers play with paint. That's part of the hit-and-miss fun of it all but I'm sure someone who was deeply into the tabla would level that exact same criticism at Get Yr Freak On.

Yes I was thinking this as well. Lex's argument stands if you say that Timbaland at least was able to make nice pictures rather than just fling random globs of colour everywhere, but I think at that point what we're talking about is (what Lex would consider to be) the success of the strategy rather than the strategy itself. Strictly speaking Animal Collective arrangements are no more random than Timbaland (or esp Xenomania or The Neptunes or Richard X or etc. etc.), though indie's habitual fuzziness/smeariness perhaps makes them seem more so.

all the other acts at least produce arrangements whereby all the constituent parts are in time and in key with each other

i don't think timbaland's adventures in tabla are really playing with "genre" as such, even w/o making the argument that he's operating at a much higher level of craftsmanship than most indie acts

i don't think timbaland's adventures in tabla are really playing with "genre" as such, even w/o making the argument that he's operating at a much higher level of craftsmanship than most indie acts

Well Lex see I agree totally with the second half of the sentence but don't see how you can argue the first. 2000-2001 was all about "irresponsible" ethno-fetishism in R&B/Hip Hop - "Big Pimpin", "Oochie Wally", "Hood Scriptures", "Ugly"... none of these tunes betray much in the way of respect for or even knowledge of the genres they swipe from. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING OF COURSE.

The way I would rephrase your argument would be to say that when indie acts try on new genres, the typic indie m.o. of deliberately "breaking" or impairing some quality of the music often translates into a seeming lack of concern with sounding fluent or even moderately competent in the incorporation of those outside elements - because the point with indie (for a lot of indie artists at least) is not to sound smooth. In this they share some tendencies with drill & bass and post-drill&bass electronic music (Tigerbeat6 etc) - which unsurprisingly was very popular among indie types.

There is a fluency to Timbaland that some indie acts lack.

But I think it's a case by case basis thing. Fool's Gold for example are very smooth! One of my other favourite "indie" albums of the year - Dan Deacon - does a lot of this sort of "play" but feels very accomplished.

Though I don't think you would like Dan Deacon, Lex. It's kind of a post-Trans Am sorta thing.

it's not as though timbaland was trying to make a bollywood showtune though! nicking bits of a different genre and appropriating them for use in your own genre such that a tabla motif actually codes more hip-hop than anything else ≠ playing with the idea of a genre - it barely acknowledges the other genre's existence

yeah i've hated dan deacon for at least a year and had been hoping not to see his name mentioned by anyone especially you :(

i am also POSITIVE that both you and tom have become a ton more indie-positive since you started hanging out w/the wrong crowd

Yes but this is not because the approach to outside music is different, it's because hip hop has such a firm identity that the use of anything codes as hip hop.

What you're complaining about then becomes indie's lack of a firm identity - or, rather, that the identity that it does have when it has one - whiny plaintive white male vocals - is both "weak" and unappealing to you.

Of course indie also embraces stuff in outside this model (Fool's Gold being an example is why this discussion started obv) - it simply doesn't have the definitional consistency that hip hop or R&B have that allow them to play with genre more "safely".

Obv this definitional consistency is a really big part of what make hip hop and R&B such strong "experimental" genres - this slightly contradictory point is an argument I've been pushing since time immemorial.

I don't really hang out on the Pitchfork message boards.

Pretty much all of my (current) indie taste come from my friend Josh who is also the guy who I sometimes strawman as the archetypal FACT reader - he also loves dubstep, Ben Klok, Floating Points, Jam City etc. etc. His favourite album of the year is Animal Collective and he was a bit disappointed that I now rate Electrik Red, The-Dream and Marcus Nasty above it (though he's accepting of my love for all that kind of stuff). He got me into Dan Deacon and The XX which (apart from Animal Collective and Fool's Gold) are the two other indie releases I really like from this year. I mostly make him UK Funky compilations.

Ha but I think you should wander through the Freaky Trigger archives if you think indie-positivism is a new thing.

i know the ft lot are totally indie. sometimes it is as if i completely imagined all the anti-indie jibes and anti-rockist arguments that i'm sure used to be common currency round here.

the people i know IRL who are obsessed w/floating points, jam city et al are exactly the same people who are obsessed w/electrik red, mariah carey and the-dream! r&b is huge huge huge for the night slugs crowd. none of the dubstep/funky heads i know give a toss about animal collective.

anti-indie jibes and anti-rockist arguments that i'm sure used to be common currency round here.

you didn't imagine them, and there still are "anti-rockist" arguments, insofar as there actually was an argument to be had. but speaking as someone who sort of missed the whole O!NO!ROCKISM! debates by a few years, they always struck me as more of a debate about WAYS of thinking about music rather than about what genre to listen to, etc.

And I don't think that these have disappeared - they've just also started to filter into the ways we listen to ALL genres, indie included. A result of this (and the aspects of music that get prized/valued in this discourse) might in fact be the visible broadening of "indie" as a genre to encompass sonics that might have previously coded as solely the bastion of pop music. i feel like *genuine* appreciation of indie music by mainstream artists and mainstream music by indie artists is far more common at the moment than it would have been say....six or seven years ago.

and there are still plenty of anti-indie jibes, but if what you desire out of music criticism is automatic and cohesive derision of indie, then i really don't know what to say. indie jibes get made because a large segment of indie music can be pigeonholed and predictable and easily satirized (see: Carles and Hipster Runoff, I suppose). but a lot of the jibes come from the place of "well, there is good indie so why must we put up with Keane/Razorlight/Wavves/NME band of the month" in the same way that i'd take shots at pop or r'n'b that i think is off the mark from my platonic ideal of awesome music.

indie-positivism =/= pop-negativism. the hyperbole is unnecessary.

although, and this would amuse you, last night at a party i met the straw-man we often pretend exists - the north american who uses NME as a sign-post for the worth of music, whose favourite band is the libertines, etc.

when told fever ray was one of the best albums of the year - following my description of it as 'electronic' and involving heavy treatment of karin's vocals - responded with 'you mean, Autotune? that's not really music...after all, it doesn't require any talent to do that.'

i was torn between arguing the 'Autotune isn't music/requires no talent point' and conceding ground just so i could preach the values of The Knife/Fever Ray

"I can't believe you listen to music that is, like... recorded... onto tape... It requires no talent to do that."

a very dear friend once said to me "i don't get what's so special about remixes, all the elements are there already"

i don't think timbaland's adventures in tabla are really playing with "genre" as such, even w/o making the argument that he's operating at a much higher level of craftsmanship than most indie acts

Oh I don't deny that an Animal Collective Bollywood rip-off would be worse than anything Timbaland has ever done, BUT I think your argument is still nonsense because the artists you generally like are borrowing from genres you know next-to-nothing about, so you have no idea whether they are actually making them sound (relatively) clunky out of context. When they borrow from genres you're into (that Eve/Skream track, virtually any hip-hop or grime track based on house or techno over the last couple of years) your reaction is a similar eye-roll.

The elephant in the room here being UK funky which is generally about as ramshackle and clunky and amateurish as a lot of indie when placed next to a lot of house and techno and that is its charm.

(This is a bit of a truism really, generally speaking rave synths sound infinitely better in, y'know, rave, than they do in r&b).

you didn't imagine them, and there still are "anti-rockist" arguments, insofar as there actually was an argument to be had. but speaking as someone who sort of missed the whole O!NO!ROCKISM! debates by a few years, they always struck me as more of a debate about WAYS of thinking about music rather than about what genre to listen to, etc.

OTM

The difference in my mind is that being ramshackle and clunky with a sequencer set-up, MIDI thing, what have you, and still feel danceable, is actually difficult. Whereas being clunky with a guitar and a drum kit and still feel, well, indie, is incredibly easy.

And yes OTM about rockism. Being anti-sexist isn't about telling people what gender to fuck.

Or alternatively it's easy to be amateurish and danceable with the former set-up and much harder to be amatuerish and danceable with the latter.

As to the former, is it really? Maybe it is these days, I dunno.

alex otm thirded

sigh i KNOW that the rockism debates were about ways of thinking about music but there's no point having abstract debates about these "ways" if there's no tangible effect, people default to animal bloody collective again and the consensus picks in all those end-of-year-lists in that thread are worse than before

But they DON'T default to animal bloody collective again. I mean. My God. Electrik Red are practically guaranteed a top 10 placing. Balearic is an actual THING. Friends of mine who listened to nothing but guitar rock for five years are raving over 30 minute Swedish beach-disco sets.

Yeah, you're not seeing critics who were 100% pro-indie switching over to a default position of all pop and no indie.

But there HAS been a tangible effect in both the critical world and the world-at-large.

ER are guaranteed a top 10 on ILX, not elsewhere, clearly.

I like cheap-sounding songs but I also like really expensive sounding songs. I remember Tim saying a year ago or so that he was all about LUSHNESS. This year's tracks aren't really so lush, though. At least not so much that that's the word I'd use. For the record my favorite lush track of all time might well be "She Bangs".

electrik red are guaranteed a top 10 placing here (and i'm not so sure about that) and nowhere else!

xp yes

Yeah but this debate is mostly happening on ILX and not in the pages of Rolling Stone or on Pitchfork...

But I can tell you that there wasn't a hipster-infested house party in the past few months that I went to that didn't blast Miley Cyrus, and every second club night at random student-run indie clubs in Montreal this summer featured K.I.G.'s Head Shoulderz Kneez and Toez and a smattering of UK Funky.

Like...even among 'Pitchfork readership' (and the 18-25 English-speaking Montreal demographic is pretty spot on a sample when it comes to this) is pretty fucking pop these days. So, both within broader critical discourse and people generally, I think there's more openness to different kinds of music.

Equality of opportunity =/= equality of result, but even the results are consistently more varied than I think they used to be. Rome wasn't built in a day.

(I mean, I'll still get some shit for repping for Ashlee's Autobiography, but stanning for Blackout as important and interesting doesn't even approach challops. How is this not an improvement?)

This year's tracks aren't really so lush, though

I think for all their sparseness, The xx probably qualify, no? (maybe not the florence remix, but their album trax for sure)

really? the florence remix is hella lush imo

I heard that Florence remix out on the dancefloor on Friday night and it doesn't quite work - the big problem is the XX's own mumbly vocals just don't translate very well. Once they bring Florence in it works so much better, given that they basically do a Utah Saints on her. That extended beat outro sounds fantastic though.

Gonna download the rest of this thread now...

yeah, but i usually don't want to dance to most dubsteppy stuff, i just like it on my headphones

The Rudenko remix is terrific - I'm *sure* I've heard that chorus elsewhere though... how old is the original? I've lost track of funky a bit in the latter half of this year but I welcome the shift towards deeper drums.

It seems utterly insane that the argument on this thread came as a result of the Fool's Gold track (which is great by the way), given that I'm not sure any of us have much of an idea what the general modus operandi of Israeli rock actually is. This song could be completely natural and un-self conscious for all I know.

Then again, I have spent the last few days mostly listening to Nigerian hip-hop that sounds like Soulja Boy and anything would sound authentic next to that.

Nigerian hip-hop that sounds like Soulja Boy

who?

And most Israeli rock that I've heard tends to be fairly ridiculous. I'd probably pick Israeli/Palestinian rap over rock, tbh. Guttural harshness of both Hebrew and Arabic lends itself well to sonics of hip hop. And some interesting jazz-rap-funk fusion going on.

Ronan, sorry I missed yr question before - sadly for you the Fool's Gold album is just 'Fool's Gold'.

2007 was definitely my year of lushness - that year I was really into Studio, Henrik Schwarz, Peter Visti DJ mixes, really deep and trippy minimal, Mungolian Jet Set, Maurice Fulton etc. Even the Polow Da Don style R&B I was also into fit the mould (as does the R&B I'm currently into for the most part I guess).

Getting into UK Funky changed that a lot because so much of it is ruff and rudimentary (one production team is even called Rudimental). Plus post-minimal fell off hard. But I haven't posted up any "balearic" stuff yet...

OMG! Ryan Leslie: "Gibberish" is a masterpiece! Thank you, Tim F!!!!

Lil' B - I'm God
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uaix8t

I don't get the impression that Lil' B is a particularly great rapper - his nasal monotone reminds me of Pusha T with less rhythmic playfulness and, well, less concern for rhyming. But there's a certain doggedness to the guy that I like anyway (the nasal voice helps here, too), and he punctuates his songs with unexpected images and metaphors that suggest that the weaker moments are just because he's too fucked up to focus, and moreover his bragging here works because he comes on so metaphysical - it's almost as if his vision of being God is from some really good/really bad acid trip rather than a comment on his place in the game. Accordingly my favourite bit on "I'm God" is the third verse where he starts busting out the whole immortal act: "Yeah is this what you really want, ya got me in the flesh now / No, I'm not stressed out, I'm God, I'm the best out / Rap transperant, my see-through glasses / Incoherent, and no I'm not starin' / I just see through you."

But anyway what makes "I'm God" fantastic isn't Lil' B's rapping but the astonishing backing music, an eerie sample from a female singer (Imogen Heap I suspect), starting with a forlorn intro before moving into the central, swooping loop that drives the track, ethereal and vaguely apocalyptic and just about as lush and otherworldly as rap gets, plus an indecipherable "chorus" all hushed and awed, sounding just like the amazement-at-yourself you'd feel if you'd just created a planet. I've listened to this about three times a day for the past month or so.

Hot Toddy ft. Ron Basejam - I Need Love (Original/Morgan Geist Dub)
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6NV2NY5M

In case you were wondering where the LUSHNESS went, I've got a couple of suitable choices coming up, starting with this.

I've loved the Hot Toddy project (one of the guys from Crazy P, formerly Crazy Penis) for about four years now (though it's been going for about ten years I think), but I've mostly associated him with peppy, uptempo vocal-laced disco-house - search for the 'Mind Trip' and 'Slave To You' 12 inches from 2004 and 2006 if you can. There's also a new Crazy P DJ mix out that seems to have a lot of Hot Toddy material on it, though I haven't nabbed it yet.

The ultra lush, ultra slow-mo balearic disco of "I Need Love" (recorded for the Eskimo label, unsurprisingly) is hardly a radical departure, but still it must gall some balearic stalwarts how the dude can just step onto their territory and best them so easily. With its pulsing bass and resonant handclaps, "I Need Love" has some of that celestial swing I loved in Maurice Fulton's remix of Alice Smith's "Love Endeavour", only it's less celebratory and more dark and dreamy, a perfect midnight ballad. Ron Basejam's smoother than smooth vocals are mysteriously romantic, and perfectly suit the gorgeously brooding piano that Hot Toddy deploys like a slowburn simmer under the dancefloor; "Will you be mine, always?" Ron murmurs like the fate of the entire world depends on your answer. Like so many of the best piano house anthems (and House of House's recent "Walkin' These Streets" falls into this category, as does Dubtribe Sound System's older classic "Do It Now"), "I Need Love" always seems to walk a tightrope between deeply depressing and deliriously uplifting, the fear of loss of love being the mere flipside to the joy of its resumption.

Despite cutting out the amazing vocals, Morgan Geist's dub improbably matches the original, keeping the same heartbeat swing groove but adding "Your Love" style synth arpeggios and eerie single note deep bass pulses. Things drop away for a winsome Chic guitar lick, before the inevitable piano chords arrive, only somehow even more brooding than in the original. If Sade's people made disco, it might sound like this.

haven't heard that but crazy p did a rather terrific lush balearic remix of "township funk", of all things, a while back

Haven't heard that! To be honest Crazy Penis back in the day often were like balearic before the fact so it's not at all surprising to hear Hot Toddy in this territory.

A Nice Hot Bath With Crazy Penis is a fantastic album. Back in the day I used to buy anything and everything on Paper Recordings. I've got that album on CD and vinyl, it's pretty much perfect. Lots of downtempo business and very little of the cheese they started spreading on the next album.

Fuzzy Logik ft. Egypt - In The Morning
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uly2p9

For the first ten seconds of my first hearing of "In The Morning" I thought, "the beat seems wrong, one of the kicks comes in too soon." Once I got used to the jolting syncopation, this was replaced by a rising sense of excitement, a realtime wonderment "how does this tune keep getting better?" Joining the stop-start drums are Egypt's flawless diva sighs, followed by a charming percolating synth arpeggios, followed by Egypt's marvelously overblown sense of joy, "You and me together / what a fantasy / such a fantasy / BAH-DA-BAH-DA-BAH!" And then by the time the chorus arrives there's the whole gamut, sudden jetstream waves of synthesiser and a winsomely warm, slightly metallic bassline following and complementing the vocals like a pen adding exclamation marks to every line.

The genius of Fuzzy Logik has two bases I think. One is his versatility: it's difficult to believe that the bubbling carnival funk of "Leader", the taut dancehall stabs of "Twiss", the sly horn drama of "Call Me", the aching piano house of "The Way You Move" and the chirpy synth lines of "Polyfunk" are all the work of the same producer, yet each masters its chosen field effortlessly. The second basis is his capacity as an arranger: the above tunes aren't always startling, but they hang together wonderfully. On his remix of Skepta and Jay Sean's "Lush", what at first appears to be a fairly simple and even conservative combination of skipping drums and a two-chord piano vamp turns out to be endlessly listenable, a groove whose hyper attraction is inexplicable and yet thoroughly tangible (though the best bit of that tune is Jay Sean murmuring "Girl better know!" all sickly sweet). "In The Morning" is a much more discourse-friendly example of this skill: the two main musical influences on the tune appear to be broken beat and electro-house - never friends or even siblings - and yet Fuzzy weaves these elements together beautifully, the burbling synth chords and stabbing groove seamlessly bouncing off one another like this was simply the latest in a long line of increasingly accomplished curios rather than the an inspired stylistic curio.

"In The Morning" joined a growing line of pop-minded uk funky tracks that failed in their tilt at the charts. The potential reasons here are legion: with Egypt's archetypal house diva vocals, was it too housey? And yet, with that headwrecking groove, not nearly housey enough? Was it really the size of Egypt's nose that stood as a barrier to success, as youtube commentary would lead you to think? Or is the (British) public just fucked in the head when it comes to recognising an amazing tune? Within the confines of the the uk funky scene itself, "In The Morning" was THE anthem of the year, a unifying vocal tune played by everyone, ubiquitous and inescapable, if difficult for DJs to mix with. Much of the credit has to go to Egypt, whose vocals are rushy, singalong-ready and simply joyful, one of the best advertisements for the sheer life-affirming joy a good diva can provide in recent times. Fittingly, "In The Morning" became something of a successor to Shakedown's "At Night" for me - a tune I use to convince myself that I actually want to get up and face the day rather than crawl back under the covers.

oh my I think that's the best track posted yet. that little sparkly sound in the left channel around at 2:16 totally pushes it over the top

hot toddy track is amazing, easily the best thing on eskimo all year.

Silkie - Planet X
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tnbcw4

None of Silkie's productions this year hit me quite as hard as the frantic drama of his 2008 classic "Sky's The Limit". For one thing, pretty much everything on his recent album (which probably dates from the same period) emphasises the traditional, loping halfstep template typical for dubstep. Still, for me Silkie's best material is among the most nuanced, kinetic and, well, nice traditional dubstep there is; a small voice in my head says "it's primarily because you're a musical neanderthal and this dude likes bright melodic motifs." That voice is probably right.

"Planet X" starts almost as cliche, with its kick drum on the 1 and the 3 and handclaps on the 3 setting up the archetypal dubstep build; the break when it comes is also dubstep cliche, a burbling, "wobbly" bassline punctuated with a scissorkick dive snare pattern between the 3 and the 4. What sets the tune apart is the sheer delight of its construction, the gymnastic agility of the post-Mala rhythms, the multitude of little details like the whining guitar licks, nervous synth squiggles, hints of saxophone somewhere in the distance, amorphous synth clouds expertly balancing the heaviness of the bass, the constant mutations of the bass itself, now rough and radioactive, now warm and amniotic.

I've heard Silkie's sound disparagingly compared to Roni Size/Reprazant, which is one of those times when haters actually get it right - that's exactly the right precedent for this stuff. Specifically the second disc of 'New Forms', all longform, deceptively simple tunes largely conforming to genre orthodoxy and yet somehow being endlessly listenable - its all in the superlative production finesse, the exact placement of every sound just so. A bit classy and (in the wrong mood) maybe even a little bit boring - but I love it nonetheless.

I like Rudimental's 'Sexy Sexy...' a lot more than 'In The Morning' and I'll never agree with how elevated the latter is just as a tune (but you knew this). on the Singles Jukebox cis pointed out how there's "nothing" there which remains my beef (tho not hers or most people who like similar stuff). that 'Lush' remix is probably in my top 50 tunes this year tho.

Jeremih - My Sunshine
http://www.sendspace.com/file/o7egjq

The primary appeal of Jeremih's album is the shiny, voluptuous high-tech R&B of tunes like "Birthday Sex", "Imma Star" and "Raindrops" - for the most part dude doesn't have the ambition of The-Dream, the earnestness of (pre-2009) Chris Brown or the sheer quality of Ne-Yo, but what he does have is charm in spades, and, just really nice songs and productions - amazingly, pretty much everything on the album falls somewhere between basically likeable and fantastic (incomprehensibly, "Imma Star" has its share of detractors round here; I think it's great).

Still, me isolating "My Sunshine" is kinda perverse, as it's one of the very few times when Jeremih breaks with his basic formula to offer up an essentially conservative ballad, draped in lugubrious piano, starry synth work and rather U2-ish rock-ballad dynamics. I wonder if my love for it is based on some kind of weird mourning for my capacity to still like Chris Brown, whose "With You" remains my secret tearjerker kryptonite. Chris could sound cosmically yearning possibly without even trying; "My Sunshine" is the only time when Jeremih goes for that quality, although he does it differently - softer, younger, more fragile but perhaps less aware of the true depths of his own emotions; first love rather than true love maybe. As the first verse draws to a close, a massive kickdrum in the far off distance announces the arrival of an almost militaristic bass and drum pulse, somehow desperately sad and yet resolved, straight backed and steady eyed - it's a moment of unexpected and unlooked-for maturation, the singer realising for the first time that life frequently is pain to be endured.

Jeremih is singing of how he wants his girl back, but the vibe of "My Sunshine" is different, more like the bittersweet determination of walking away from love because it's impossible or doomed - think of Tobey Maguire striding from his grandfather's grave at the end of the first Spiderman movie, or Buffy getting on a bus out of town at the end of season 2. There's that same mixture of regret and determination and debilitating uncertainty, a final heartbreaking guitar solo signifying everything being thrown away. Someone needs to snap this up for end credits asap.

i should really listen to the jeremih album. "birthday sex" was so perfect that it made me not want to hear anything else by him, a bit of a lumidee situation.

tim!! have you heard lloyd's new (free) ep! YOU MUST. link on r&b thread.

best programmed pop perfection track of 2009 that tim and the lex haven't probably listened to yet

give it a listen:

Shaque Lilli - 'You Can't Kill Me'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuE3SzZOH9k

released in Denmark only

also:

Shaque Lilli - myspace
http://www.myspace.com/shaquelilli

Tim, thanks for doing this again.

Quick question: Are these being posted in the order you intend for them to be played in, like a mix?

Lex! A Lloyd review is forthcoming - downloaded it off yr twitter recommendation.

Talrose - no, the order is pretty random except that I'm saving the top one or two for the very end.

It's nice to see that Silkie album get some props.

yeah the silkie album is dope as fuck

Ill Blu - Time To Get Nasty
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jp6tpm

I've started several homemade compilations with "Time To Get Nasty", on account of its brilliantly eerie intro: a solitary Danny Weed style persian clarinet riff is slowly enveloped by a surround-sound, bassy sheen like a THX "the audience is listening" advertisement, then one of those levitating five beats per bar patterns that Ill Blu always do so well, always reminding me of stones skipping across the surface of a lake at high speed, then more and more tense counter-percussion and shrill string riffs, before it all falls away as a warped commander announces "Time to get nasty!" And like a guillotine falling, an onslaught of high-drama synth vamps at once punitive and faintly gothic duck and weave around the stabbing beat. I know nothing about drums, but "Time To Get Nasty" doesn't offer a steady kickdrum, just its dancehall beat impacting solidly in the mid-range; this gives the tune the effect of aiming at your head as much or more than your mid-range, like a nervous boxer so light on its feet they barely touch the ground.

The reference points are easy: Danny Weed's "Shank Riddim", Davinche's "Mr. DJ", that rendezvous between steely futurism and cheesy goth melodrama that puts me in mind of The Matrix visually and therefore of course Missy's Da Real World musically. What Ill Blu share with Da Real World and Danny Weed is a certain meticulousness even at their ruffest and tuffest, an almost prissy insistence on having everything in its right place.

The menace of high-tech precision: in 2009 this should be the most tiresome of all possible aesthetics for populist dance music, but any aesthetic defined so broadly can always be as good as producers are prepared to make it (as a side note, when someone claims "x is back", they invariably mean "x was always there but the cultural products it's inspiring right now seem good or important enough to make an issue of") - it would make sense for this particular niche to be creatively exhausted, endlessly spinning its shiny car wheels, but in Ill Blu's hands it's the gift that keeps on giving, perhaps due to the ruthless kineticism of their grooves. This is the slight edge that Ill Blu's best work has over, say, Joker & Ginz's "Purple City" (an enormous, brilliant track to be sure, and probably the only "wonky" track I'd call a truly deserving popular anthem), the music's grounding in house offering it a truly ravey, propulsive drive that makes everything seem just a little bit more high stakes on the dancefloor.

the hot toddy track won't download for me because it's on megaupload - would somebody mind uploading it to sendspace? thanks

nevermind, found another download link

Azari & III - Reckless With Your Love
http://www.sendspace.com/file/229est

"Reckless With Your Love" isn’t merely a fine recreation of first wave vocal Chicago house, though obviously it does that too, ticking nearly all the boxes worth ticking: a male diva whose performance sounds simultaneously soulful, catty, camp and heartfelt (tick); evocative lyrics appearing to deal with rampant sexual promiscuity and possibly the spectre of HIV (tick); and an addictive groove combining bouncing synth chords, piano vamps and histrionic string riffs (tick).

The thing is, I'm not sure when all of these boxes have in fact been ticked simultaneously before, or at least not so superlatively, so easily: if Jamie Principle's early house singles were an early peak for the form, they're also slightly too idiosyncratic at their romantic, mournful end ("Your Love", "It's A Cold World", "Waiting On My Angel") and too completely sleazy (i.e. concealing that crucial pathos) at their dirty end ("Baby Wants To Ride", "Bad Boy"). Robert Owens was a master too, of course, but his best work strikes me less as great songs than as delirious dark soul exorcisms over disorienting grooves.

"Reckless With Your Love" is more like a tribute to early diva house in general, capturing something of the alien compulsion of, say, DJ Pierre's "Got The Bug", but also the yearning and comfort of Blaze's "If You Should Need a Friend". But, too, Azari & III have the benefit of having watched all the twists and turns that diva house has taken since - from "U Don't Know Me" to "A New Day". If this sort of house is always inherently nostalgic, always a throwback, it is this built-in gaze fixed to the past which also makes it so ripe for continual regeneration: the entire point of male diva house, to be reductionist, might be: "in the future, we will understand the past better." Though it's hard to imagine understanding the past better than here, and this (in particular) jewel of a chorus I could spend forever wishing I'd written.

More prosaically, there's a gorgeous plumpness and moistness to Azari & III's production that dates it as modern, its use of sounds that are both driving and sweet taking its cues (if not actual sound effects) in part from early 90s tunes like Robin S's "Show Me Love", in part from electro-house and everything that has happened in its wake. If the voluptuous sheen of the groove here still sounds fresh after nearly a decade of intermittent attempts to revive this sound (and, of course, it was already old at the start of this process), it speaks to the stranglehold that the (early) 80s aesthetic has on popular culture. It's entirely possible that, as with La Roux et. al. finally fully popularising electroclash, the revival which maybe began with The Rapture's "I Need Your Love" will finally find windspread purchase. If that happens, "Reckless With Your Love" will be sheltered from over-exposure by its own male diva classicism, its devotion to this story within a story taking it outside the dictates of (sonic) fashion, like some sort of timeless ideal, pristine and dense with emotional implication; revival, sure, but also so much more.

yah that was in my top 10

I have you to thank for discovering it deej. I then gave it to a friend who immediately demanded a history of male diva house, which is maybe why my post frames it in that context so much.

i cant think of a similarly revivalist style track where the revivalism could possibly bother me any less

Montee - Isle of Now
http://www.sendspace.com/file/oi9qpj

Montee's mixture of signifiers can feel like such a calculated synthesis of Patrick Bateman taste that it's probably going to be hard for many people to get over or past it - it's feasible to resemble one or even a couple of Hall & Oates, Steely Dan (circa The Roya Scam), The Doobie Bros, Phil Collins or Huey Lewis & The News, but all at once? The immediate rock critic question to ask is "do they mean it?" but that seems precisely the wrong question to ask to me; or, rather, the answer feels obvious but also obviously not in the form of a yes or no. The lesson rock crit refuses to learn when it comes to irony is the extent to which the question of sincerity vs irony is suspended in so much pop music, particularly in music that consciously references the past; as with Daft Punk's Discovery, Montee feel propelled by nostalgia, or perhaps more specifically by an idea of what their version of the past might mean and how it offers something different to the present. In that sense they don't "mean it" - this is a theory, a construct, a performance - but they desperately want to.

I want to, too: Montee's combination of genteel falsetto vocals, ringing guitars, fluid bass, massive synth chords and supple white funk rhythms feels effortlessly open; it doesn't pine for a simpler time, but for a more optimistic one certainly - again, a good reference point is Discovery, whose emotions are never simple but always boldly stated (on a strict stylistic level, but still accurate emotionally, the best point of comparison is probably early Phoenix singles); this can be contrasted with a presumption in so much contemporary popular music (and not just "indie" music, though certainly there) that displays of emotion will appear truer if done obliquely. Neither way is better, but beyond its superficial stylistic resemblances, it's this music's bombastic emotional unity that will cause you to love or to hate it, to sense in it some kind of trick or lie or sneer (no rock critic is consistent enough to always or never choose to "see through" such tactics though - in fact such inconsistency is perhaps a founding prejudice of taste), or to allow yourself to be swept away.

The title track of the group's album is glossy fake rock-disco along the lines of Simple Minds' Sons & Fascination album, all sculpted rises and falls from pulsing basslines to shimmering synthesiser backed multitracked vocals and ringing guitars - a sound completely edgeless and suggestive not of the future (even when the sound was new) but of a hightech permanent now. It peaks with a stratospheric chorus of power chords so airy and widescreen that the lyrics' indecipherable meaning feels utterly appropriate - this is basically a giant exclamation mark, a sense of wonder devoid of any specific content but no less affecting for that - sometimes wonder is the state of mind you must adopt in order to find the content worthy of it.

but of a hightech permanent now

i love now!

Tim; have you done this favourite tracks of the year kind of thing in the past? If you have then could you possibly post the tracklists please?

this thread has 2007 + 2008 on it - 2007 that was (by Tim)

Busy Signal - Da Style Deh
http://www.sendspace.com/file/yykd7y

Near as I can tell (and I'm no expert obv) dancehall is going through an oddly emotional phase - heaps of tunes with lugubrious autotuned vocals, over pretty piano tinkles and string riffs, the vibe somewhere between T-Pain and Mavado. A good example is the new Vybz Kartel album, which is pretty much wall to wall this style; even the sex tunes feel rather mournful. This is not the only thing happening though; the necessary counterweight is all the raw, stripped down party tunes, whose simple bass and percussion grooves recall the early 90s in their smiling unconcern.

I guess you'd put "Da Style Deh" in the second category if anywhere, though its fluid tribal groove also recalls the percussive frenzy of dancehall circa 2004. But certainly the stripped down vibe is very now - this is basically Busy, some hand drums and some spiritual sounding backing vocals. Busy of course is more than enough to carry the tune, here sounding like a welcoming circus showman even as he gets very explicit in the verses ("up inna belly where mi send mi si cocki" etc. but what do you expect). What you take home with you is the fabulous chorus, which goes pure carnival: "She say 'eh le le le leh le le leh le le leh! ooh la lu la loo la la lah la la loh!'", backing vocalists echoing every line.

Those backing vocals make the tune sound much more wholesome and heartwarming than it is (I'm pretty sure the tongue-twisting chorus is a account of Busy's girl having an orgasm), really, though dancehall is better at making songs about sex sound almost innocent in their celebratory joy than probably any other genre; at any rate it's this feel in particular that keeps me coming back to "Da Style Deh"; this, it seems, is a brand of spirituality that I can really get with. Hoping that stuff like this is in more ready abundance next year.

The Very Best - Julia
http://www.sendspace.com/file/wbm1jr

It occurs to me that I have never gotten around to listening to Major Lazers, despite the fact I might quite like them. The problem is not that I expect this music to be bad, but that in 2009 this whole idea of the international language of booty simply doesn't have the same appeal that it might once have had - not after 'Gold Teeth Thief' and M.I.A. and Hollertronix and every other DJ who thought randomly adding a reggaeton or funk carioca track to their set would establish their open-minded diversity. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the idea of this kind of stylistic diaspora was more appealing before such projects made it so explicit, after which it became a race for the diminishing returns of spruiking ever more obscure developing world dance musics.

It probably doesn't help that, far from establishing some sort of group of nations style alliance, most of the key genres included in those loose confederacy have retreated into themselves or (at least) away from one another. And perhaps there's a certain snobbery at work - I know enough "real" dancehall, say, to feel like I don't "need" the fake stuff (though "real" and "fake" are very blunt notions with which to think about a style as broadly disseminated and influential as dancehall).

It was probably a similarly vague sense of apathy that meant I never checked out last year's much heralded mixtape by UK DJs Radioclit and East African singer Esau Mwamwaya - heralded, so I hear, for its astounding mixture of african pop, dancehall, hip hop, indie rock... well you get the drill. The actual debut album from the teaming under the moniker of The Very Best doesn't have anything like that range, basically being a combination of Mwamwaya's stirring, often multitracked vocals and Radioclit offering up high-tech arrangements. This sounds like the sort of project that would normally involve either Diplo or Damon Albarn, or possibly both. And The Very Best certainly move in a post-Diplo world, mixing Mwamwaya's vocals with arrangements that reflect a range of "urban diaspora" styles, in particular dancehall and kudoro. The biggest difference is probably that I don't know enough of the African music The Very Best draw on to be snobbish, lacking the wisdom to tell real from fake or to care if fake is what I'm left with.

The other more subtle distinction is that The Very Best wear this kind of "international language of booty" vibe very lightly - this is partly because of the unexpectedly romantic and at times cheesy openness of the arrangements - check the solemn drums on opener "Yalira" - which abandons the kinds of "ghetto youth" assumptions that increasingly dominate such multicultural efforts (i.e. this is not music that feels it needs to be clearly demarcated as "urban"). More substantially, Mwamwaya's singing is simply so joyful and commanding that it banishes any judgment that might be made about the backing music, which is there really to give him a suitably uplifting platform for his performances. This is not to say that The Very Best's music is unremarkable - far from it, in fact - but rather that it feels, to me at least, as being difficult to second guess, to want to second guess even.

So much of the music here is amazing, though: the ecstatic "Chalo" is propelled by world-ending synth chords that imagine Van Halen's "Jump" as a hymn to the sun, while "Warm Heart of Africa" is ridiculously sweet ramshackle kitchen sink pop that reminds me of M.I.A.'s "Amazon" (including the gorgeous harmonies); on "Agonde" the tabla rhythms are so pearly pert, so fit-to-burst with swollen moisture that the entire song feels like some lurid screensaver of impossibly colourful orchirds opening. At first "Julia", with its whining synth chords and staticky snare crashes and thick bass pulse, feels like it might cleave closer to hip hop mores and be weaker for it, but any such concerns are swept away by Mwamwaya, whose harmonised cries "Julia! Julia!" suggest a celebration almost stern in its singleminded focus. It's a chorus of improbable wideness, able and willing to surround you completely in its comfortable embrace. Unusually, "Julia" is optimistic in form as well as content, suggesting that, after years of pillaging, there may still be something to rebuild.

have you heard busy's "picante" tim? really like "da style deh" but prefer this - was huge at carnival this year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmZ9y97uRFE

That Ne-yo "Miss Independent" riddim is being used all through the Caribbean and South America. Did you folks hear Vybz on it? The sex-filled lyrics got it banned and condemned in Jamaica.

Vybz's "Ramping Shop" lyrics

"ramping shop" is amazing - completely out of tune over the miss independent riddim though, but they redid it over a different riddim a few months later

really enjoying all this tracks, great thread

paramour is awesome

Alphabeat - Always Up With You
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ibulbz

I haven't decided what I think about Alphabeat's new album The Spell, which seems to invest an impressive amount of effort into sounding as fizzy as possible for its entirety, but maybe doesn't have the super strong hooks it thinks it does (compare to prior hit "Fascination" which was all hooks). However I do still have a slight crush on the male singer Anders, whose newfound penchant for fop-tops and blue suits and singing like Newton (remember him?) at least speaks well for his potential obtainability. For this reason if no other I'll probably stick with The Spell long enough to end up liking at least a couple of tracks well enough.

The track that stood out like a beacon on first listen was this one: not the only song to stake its reputation on the timeliness of a revival of The Real McCoy, but by far the best and most consummate. "Always Up With You" is basically just a succession of good bits: the piano vamping in the verses, Anders' serious-face singing, the more amazing staggered piano vamping in the chorus, the girl singer's shrieking backing vocals, the EQ'd build-up bits, the trancey middle-eight and breakdown, the girl singer's final "oh woah! oh oh oh woah! oh oh oh woah! No matter No matter!" fade-out vocals, the general ruthlessness of the song's hold-and-release economy.

Alphabeat seem to have chafed at their public presentation last time round as goofy "classic pop" types who appeared to have a slightly indie mentality - this may be down to the fact that they occasionally sported cardigans and shamefully appeared to play their own instruments, but there's also the fact that "Fascination" in particular sounded like someone's idea of a "perfect" pop song (at least in the "unsustainably ecstatic" category), which is a kind of indie thing to want to do, especially when the song's appeal is at least partly due to the fact that you know that's what the band is trying to do, and you can sense that they know that you know, and they know that you know that they know... etc.

This time around Alphabeat seem to want to be more completely and unambiguously pop, which ironically means becoming more serious and less cute, not to mention more dressed up (hence the blue suits and so on). But trying to stake out pop "properly" is an impossible task: the cynical response is simply that Alphabeat have swapped their influences, now being SAW, eurodance and handbag house (I'm also curiously reminded of the career arc of Bis). This is a particular problem on less catchy songs, where you're more likely to sit back and think "I see what you're doing here... and here... and here..." But that's not the only reason the group should be lifting their hook-writing game: if they could genuinely make like The Real McCoy and bust out about three dancefloor classics like this on one album, their place in history - or mine at least - would be assured.

Lulu Rouge - Melankoli (Mungolian Jet Set Wet Version)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pfwek3

Mungolian Jet Set's remix compilation We Gave It All Away... Now We Are Taking It Back was one of my favourite albums of the year, its spacey, always surprising and often ridiculous disco and slow-mo house ultimately resembling an ostentatious homage to the Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, the kind of revivalism that works completely because (a) the resemblance is overall rather than in the specific sonic details, and (b) who else would be crazy enough to do it?

However all the best tracks on the compilation came from previous years, so I thought I'd give you this pretty amazing remix from this year. The "Melankoli" remix is kind of different for Mungolian Jet Set though: for one thing, it's unambiguously house, albeit of a melodic and emotional stripe. For another, it's pretty straight-faced, with no goblin voices or high-pitched divas or odd samples in sight; this is basically the sort of pretty, lugubrious tech-house that we all used to love Kompakt for, while its sonic palette reminds me of Booka Shade circa "In White Rooms" - functional but exquisitely arranged percussion, wafty synth melodies, trancey arpeggios and an increasingly evil-sounding bassline, punctuated with rippling bass-end synth riffs and thunderclap sounds (cheesily focused around Lulu Rouge's sleepy sigh "It's only raining because of you..." - there's a certain, shall we, bluntness about Mungolian Jet Set that I quite approve of).

Beyond the specific sounds, there's a kind of succulence to this track that reminds me of Booka Shade: Ronan once said that the latter group (in their prime) made music that sounded like a spotlight was shining on each component, which I took to mean that everything sounds so clean and shiny and carefully-prepared and never extraneous, and this track shares this quality, going on for ten minutes but neither growing repetitive nor over-stuffed, instead gracefully flowing from one motif to the next. It's a reminder (one of several dotted through the group's discography) that Mungolian Jet Set can "do" restraint and finesse. This might be worrying if it signaled a new direction for the group (or, rather, an abandonment of the old), but the group's work to date has been marked by so many apparent new directions that drawing conclusions from any single track is pointless. So instead just enjoy this beautifully delicate emo-dance track for what it is.

Donae'o - Love To Happen
http://www.sendspace.com/file/sh4xyq

As part of an end of year wrap up done by my local mag I had to nominate a few figures for "Artist of the Year" and, shamefully, totally forgot Donae'o. Shamefully, because this guys is the fuckin' Midas of 2009 - everything he touched turned to gold. You want to turn K.I.G.'s "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes" from something fun to something fun and oddly moving? Call Donae'o. You want to make Lethal B not pointless? Call Donae'o. He made a pretty good album too, sometimes seeming to sum up the appeals of UK funky with surgical precision, and sometimes being just endearingly odd and out on its own. Certainly it seems hard to credence the fact that Donae'o is not only one of the scene's truly great performers - a weird amalgam of Mavado and R Kelly - but also one of its great producers, his choppy, bass-driven sound effortlessly capturing the avant-ness of funky while also being eminently populist.

It's a further oddity that Donae'o - who is a great producer in his own right - is also so comfortable jumping on other people's tunes; his biggest hit "Party Hard" rides Canadian deep house producer Suges' eerie "We Belong To The Night". I thought I'd provide you with a Donae'o cut that didn't make his album, perhaps because he chose to swipe the music from French house producer DJ Gregory's "Don't Panic" at the same time that rapper Gracious K used the same production as the basis for his ubiquitous "Migraine Skank" - and it appears Gracious K won the race to license his tune for official release. What does it say about funky generally that a French house tune could be such a crucial track for the scene? Once you hear "Don't Panic" it's not so surprising, given the tune is built around a five beat per bar Carribean rhythm pattern rather than a conventional 4X4 house groove. Moreover the tune's weird combination of sparseness, deepness, spaciness and catchiness would make it a potential anthem in any category it might potentially fit - for uk funky's purposes, I think what is attractive about the tune is how it makes the syncopation of its rhythm so front and central, the graininess of its beats meaning that despite its high production values it also makes perfect sense providing the basis for a fairly rudimentary post-grime skank rap as it does for Gracious K - there's a sense that the tune is high-quality but not refined; it's still noisy and unkempt.

Donae'o takes a different tack, offering one of his most conventional R&B performances to date - "Love To Happen" being a strangely (though not strange for Donae'o) earnest-sounding warning to a girl he's checking that playing it cool won't work on him (the full lyric for the title is "I can't wait for love to happen"). The tune works both as an odd R&B/house fusion and as an intra-scene dance track: indistinguishable from the original "Don't Panic" initially, it only announces its true identity with one of Donae'o's signature scats "ba dum bodo eh, ba dum bohdembey...", as energising and thrilling in the mix as an ubiquitous piano riff or diva squeal. Moreover, even more than with "Party Hard", Donae'o makes the tune his own: I now can't hear the original without hearing the guy's vocals in my head, they play with and bounce off the groove so well. I suspect Donae'o likes taking non-UK tunes and transforming them like this because it's easier to assert partial ownership, but I like to think it's also part of his own critique of the scene and his place within it; recognising that the genre isn't defined by any single quality, he likes the idea of turning his own force of personality into that which most clearly makes these tunes "funky". This is grossly untrue in fact: both "Don't Panic" and "We Belong To The Night" were scene anthems as instrumentals. Maybe think of what Donae'o does as some kind of elaborate ceremony of recognition, the king bestowing his blessings on two very worthy adopted subjects.

hey tim i read your blog post on ill blu & was wondering if you have or have links to these mp3s (or youtubes, w/e)

Lloyd - Girls Around The World (Ill Blu Remix)
Aaliyah - Rock The Boat (Ill Blu Remix)
Donae'o - Watching Her Move (Ill Blu Remix)

I have the first and the third as part of mixes (but spliced as individual tracks) if you want. The second only in the middle of full-length radio sets.

the gap between how i react to donae'o when i hear his tracks in the club and when i put his tracks on at home/on headphones is astonishingly large

I have an mp3 of the Aaliyah mix and can send it to either of you, if you'd like.

yes please!

i only have an unsatisfying minute-long snippet of it

oh, you too, I guess

I was gonna email it, but here

http://limelinx.com/files/c5dbdc57b1939a70cf5f82809cf09011

amazing...but it won't open in itunes for me :(

can't help u there

Cheers for this Rev, I had started to assume this would be a track that would vanish in the mists of time...

if anyone can post the others...

itunes is a pain about tags. vlc or audion will play it. you can also download jaikoz and correct the tags then itunes will take it.

i am deeply, deeply in love with that hot toddy tune, now a belated contender for my track of 2009. i thank you for that alone, tim.

great thread!

i couldnt load the ill blue track either, so i loaded it into garage band and exported it, doubt i lost that much res

some choice tunes Tim...cheers

amazing that worked for me too

xp

Manuel Tur ft. Alexander East - Will Be Mine
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0htpde

Must admit to being kind of burned out on dubbiness (in the post-Basic Channel sense) in house and techno - seems like the idea has been enjoying a revival of some sort ever since it emerged; when people started talking about dub-techno being "back" in 2007 I got confused, like, "so, Kompakt weren't a Basic Channel tribute label approximately one quarter of the time?" Of course it's a simply lovely sound - or even, when deployed in a more limited or partial fashion, effect - so I'm not really burned out on it, just on the idea of it being somehow interesting in 2009. At this stage out'n'out Basic Channel revivalism ought to be classed alongside "ambient dub", surely? (i.e. background music faintly redolent of simpler times in our lives)

In some ways Basic Channel referentiality in the general sense is a concrete European manifestation of the more insubstantial concept of "deepness" that currently has such purchase in the discursively exhausted landscape of dance music crit. In both cases, the thing-in-music that we enjoy becomes more elusive the more rigorously we attempt to legislate with regard to what "counts", while the truly interesting remainder is pushed to the edges, not acknowledged (commonly, interesting "deep" tracks aren't thought of as such, while much of the "deep house" that is interesting is not interesting for its "deepness" per se).

"Will Be Mine" is deep and dubby, but like most of my favourite deep house it pursues this sound in a manner that plays with the flash and glamour of its hooks, vocals and percussion. It's a pretty intoxicating piece of deep-divatudiness, the androgynous Alexander East muttering and moaning and murmuring over an arrangement that sounds like an incredibly moist factory, all squelches and spurts and sudden jets of steam (its waterlogged feel reminds me of Jichael Mackson's "The Grass Is Always Greener" from a few years back). It's fairly blunt in its attempts to evoke space and depth too, but I like bluntness in my music too: after about two minutes of sounding distant and ghostly over a gradually warming bassline, East's vocals are suddenly intimately close, like he's floated right next to you while you were entranced by the music.

And then drops the track's secret weapon, a dubbed-out rotating drum pattern that gracefully drives the rest of the track like a water mill, its levity contrasting with the stately glide of the tune's lugubrious synth chords, and giving the impression that the tune actually cycles through its various states of gauziness and haziness like a submarine plumbling unknown ocean depths. But the other key is East's vocals, which are simultaneously mournful, imperious and yearning: "Good love is hard to find... pleasure will be mine!" (but sometimes it sounds like "let your will be mine!" I actually like this ambiguity, how East manages to sound at once demanding and subservient, or perhaps demandingly subservient). It's the relationship between all of these elements that makes "Will Be Mine" so bewitching, the absolute need of the vocal mutated by the echo-chamber mysteriousness of the arrangement, like desire in an iron lung.

NB. the very different, very warm house of the Arto Mwambe Dub is also excellent BTW.

Loving the picks but I still can't get with UK Funky..

ditto

so many people i've tried to introduce uk funky too say they don't get it either. i don't understand why, it seems so accessible and natural to enjoy, especially if you'd enjoyed 2-step back in the day :(

aaliyah track rev posted is prolly a good bridge btwn 2step and uk funky esp for ppl who liked the garage-timbo remixes back when. Also venom and damage remix of birthday sex btw.

Loving the picks but I still can't get with UK Funky..

Becoming depressingly used to this reaction from people who otherwise 'get' my taste - not so much antipathy as... puzzlement.

Which is odd because it's at the very centre of my taste.

I'm interested to hear if there's stuff that people have particularly liked or disliked, or where they've disagreed with my take completely...

Jordan I haven't forgot about the other Ill Blu tracks, will try to get onto that tonight (uploading stuff takes about ten times as long as downloading for me and seizes up my entire bandwidth, so even doing each of these songs monopolises my computer for about an hour).

Yes it is bizarre and I'm sorry to depress you! Perhaps I need to properly immerse myself, teach myself how to love it (which is possible - but that's another discussion). I just remember one horrific listening experience with Bongo Jam by Crazy Cousinz when you were doing a round-up last year - it was a kind of horrified reaction...that possibly coloured whatever funky I've heard subsequently. It was as bad a reaction as when I first heard 'Flowers' or 'Neighbourhood' (to cite how much I love the 2-step stuff) was so positive.

On a very simple level, the trickier drum programming could recommend one over the other to a certain listener.

*drum-programming of 2-step that is...although that is a completely surface-level judgement.

This kind of thing ties in a lot with my "reverse magic show" theory of music enjoyment, which is basically that getting into particular types of music is like the opposite of watching a magician perform a trick and then learning how to do it. Often you start disenchanted and able to "see through" the trick/music, able to see all the wires etc. and think "but this isn't magic! It's just (insert prosaic explanation)". And then the more you listen, it's like the magician's force of personality takes over and you become tricked into looking where she wants you to, not noticing the wires, and genuinely accepting the spectacle as "real".

The common reaction of outsider/sceptics when people compare funky to 2-step is "yes but that the production isn't nearly as complex/interesting/tricky/novel etc. is it?"

Whereas I think people who are genuinely into funky think "no it is as complex/interesting/tricky/novel, it just works differently, according to a different logic."

It's not actually the case that the funky-listeners are "more right"; I think neither position has a monopoly on correctness, they're just the different ways that funky appears from a position of enchantment vs dis- (or pre-) enchantment.

(for the same reason, when someone complains of dance music generally that "b-b-but it all sounds the same!" they're not actually wrong, it's a mode of listening that privileges certain notions of sameness and difference, according to which dance music really does "all sound the same"; people who listen to dance music compulsively often then feel the same way about other genres, rock or jazz say)

I think that maybe I'm not the best person to act as ambassador for funky because I come from a position of such enchantment that I just blithely assume the appeals are obvious, I'm probably better off preaching to the converted.

And maybe this is the real reason why all the stuff which is (at least partially) funky but appeals to people according to logics of other genres (in particular dubstep) is so much more successful, on a critical level at least; it's much easier for people to become "enchanted" by it because they're already engaging in that willing-suspension-of-disbelief with (e.g.) dubstep, after which maybe the stuff I generally prefer is then easier to tackle, whereas at first blush funky-qua-funky just looks like a bad magic show.

maybe the problem is that you may be encouraged to think of having to get to like a genre as opposed to just finding examples within it that appeal to you. another possibility is the offset within Funky's accessibility (it's not mainstream vs that not mattering when we have immediate access via internet) and how you feel about that (how accessible is it to YOU compared to other dance you like or liked).

but the rhythmic issue occurred to me too. a lot of Funky production is arguably more intricate than 2 Step (which usually wasn't really, just had a novel dynamic at the time) but because it's more rooted in 4-4 House (even with the calypso-derived snares or grimey patterns e.g. 'Mr Bean'). at least, the Funky tracks i don't like tend to play down percussion or make it too background but without compensating for that in some other way that excites me (e.g. richer melodic or atmospheric details). maybe without anything noteworthy about the drum programming sceptics find it hard to get excited about if they're not excited by actual current deep house, tribal/latin house and similar (as opposed to the en vogue revivalist stuff that sounds more like Classic House).

Thanks for the long and brilliant response! I completely agree with the magic show analogy -- in fact I thought the way non-dance people relate to dance music is applicable to your theory a couple of paragraphs in, but then you covered that yourself!

Massively simplified but:

Friend: I can't bear electronic dance music. It (both) all sounds the same and is too repetitive. It's not as dynamic or warm as the things i like.
Me: That's the point! That's why we love it so! I couldn't have it any other way.

The magician's lure has had me. Also, I imagine the last paragraph refers to the attempts at (supposedly) 'legitimising' funky by people like Kode9 and Untold, and it's relationship to the way dubstep heads start to enjoy funky either in spite of itself or by proxy?

Blueski: yeah, rooted in my initial point was the fact that 2-step programming 'seems' trickier/more complex/involved, not to say that the funky style is as nuanced or detailed in its own form.

But a lot of these specific genre love affairs derive from an incredible early reaction; it's happened with all of my favourite music over the past few years. But stuff can also happen more gradually. Either way I need to do some more investigating, amidst all the other stuff I feel obliged to check out and have an opinion on.

x-post Yes I think that's right Steve - intricacy of programming in 2-step was on the same level as funky really, existing on a spectrum of complexity with probably even more tracks having "the same beat" that was really quite simple (basically the d&b 2-step beat at garage tempo).

It also occurs to me that 2-step emerged at a time when beat complexity in a pop (or pop-related musics) was still a relatively "new" thing critically - after all it was only a year behind Timbaland ("One In A Million" was released in 1996, while "Destiny", "My Desire (Dreem Teem Remix)" and various other signature 2-step tunes came out in 2007) and a whole bunch of listeners didn't get on board with this idea until about 2000 when both 2-step and this more general tendency in pop music were peaking commercially. So maybe contextually the music was always going to seem more exciting.

Whereas in 2009, to the extent that there is an across-the-board movement behind any particular sonic approach in pop music, it's an emphasis on the textural - this is the secret connection between say The-Dream/Tricky Stewart and then indie darlings like MGMT or AnCo (ha lex I'm saying this deliberately to annoy you!). UK Funky is very rarely interested in texture in that sense; if anything an excess of that kind of texture is inimal to the entire set of sonic assumptions it bases itself on. So UK Funky in this context might appear to be both "nothing new" and sonically enfeebled if listened to with typical 2009 ears.

Actually what really marks out a producer like Bok Bok vis a vis typical funky the kind of funky that Marcus Nasty plays is the heightened focus on texture in the former, all of those thick post-eighties-R&B synth chords he uses. It sounds much more "now".

Also, I imagine the last paragraph refers to the attempts at (supposedly) 'legitimising' funky by people like Kode9 and Untold, and it's relationship to the way dubstep heads start to enjoy funky either in spite of itself or by proxy?

Yes, though it's not even a case of attempted legitimation necessarily - I accept that a lot of producers who fall into this category are genuinely enthused by funky per se and would be horrified by the notion that what they're trying to do is make funky acceptable to dubstep fans. Nonetheless what are often quite subtle production choices can make all the difference here, making stuff seem more "magical" to many non-funky-fans than it might otherwise - e.g. my example of Bok Bok and synthesisers.

This can be compared to the much more obvious difference-in-philosophy you get in the Kode9 single, which rides its dystopian-queasiness angle so hard that I think by any reasonable assessment it can only be considered related-to-funky.

Closer to what I'd consider to be funky's "core", Ill Blu are finally (finally!) starting to build a head of critical steam behind them in large part because their music makes a lot of sense viewed from a grime perspective: anyone who was seduced by the charms of "Shank Riddim" should be able to "get" Ill Blu fairly easily/quickly. Obv. the same was true for Lil Silva.

and Geeneus i'd say

i think texture is incredibly important to uk funky! and has been from the start - cf the dreamcloud synths on "in the air", the sinister noises on "falling again"...even at its most dancehall-inflected, like sticky's riddims this year, the textures of those squealing strings are crucial.

the reason i assume people should get funky is because there's nothing to "get" - it sounds like so many things at once that it should be virtually impossible not to find a way in, and what it does is so straightforwardly enjoyable that i just don't understand why anyone could feel negatively about it. i mean it's not like dubstep or even grime where you have to take a step towards it, and accept a draggy tempo or shouty aggression as a genre rule.

i've seen uk funky tracks dismissed as "chav music" on the popjustice forums, which only goes to prove my point that everyone there needs to be punched in the face.

if indeed animal collective's appeal is texture-based, god help you all.

For me, funky's emphasis on syncopation over sound design frippery is like 97% of why I love it!

Closer to what I'd consider to be funky's "core"

NNNGGGGGGG tim please don't DO THAT!

non-existent divisions! again!

With Geeneus I think it's more the actual grime/dubstep connection that causes people to give him the benefit of the doubt - tunes like "I Tried" and "Emotions" are arch-conservative vocal house really, "Make Me" is great but straightforward tribal house, with the exception of its detuned synth hook "Yellowtail" is straightforward soca-house, its awesomeness aside "As I" is standard vocal funky... "Crackish"/"Get Low" is the first Geeneus single that really pushes that grime angle enthusiastically.

i think texture is incredibly important to uk funky!

Maybe Rev's term "sound design frippery" is closer to what I'm getting at.

NNNGGGGGGG tim please don't DO THAT!

I only mean it in the way I would consider Sunship to be closer to 2-step's "core" than Stanton Warriors, or Ruff Sqwad closer to grime's "core" than Virus Syndicate. It's not divisive to suggest that some producers are more emblematic of the general sound of a genre than others.

re texture it strikes me as more an empthasis on space - space for the fairly pure (and often trad/preset-ish) sounds to fill the gaps. so what texture is there often doesn't feel intricate and heavily developed (same as in much RnB pop) as in not complicated layers of sculpted sound or at least sounds where it's difficult to know what it is or how was it made. maybe this is because the hooks tend to be staccato and everything is pretty short and swift so if you DO look to geek out on this aspect of production with dance, that can be an obstacle too. that's irrespective of the positive vibes of the tunes, or the occasional spookier/darker feel (usually understated or reduced to afomentioned staccato strings or v soft low bass).

Yes, like 2-step, funky is in love with staccato*, whereas modern production in most other populist genres tends towards the smeary (but where I'd depart from steve is to note that smeariness is pretty big in R&B/hip hop too, whether or not it's intricate or heavily developed.

* which is why the highest melodic instrument in both genres is the xylophone.

whats your verdict on future garage Tim...synkro, vvv and that sort of stick ?

Not actually familiar with either of those producers!

I'd gotten the impression that "future garage" referred to Joy Orbison, Brackles, some Falty DL... is this off?

to be honest i think its too early to tell who and what future garage is. whistla coined it as a split from dubstep towards the "more step less dub/wub' angle. there's even a forum and mj cole seems to be au fait with it all:)

but you've probably heard 'everybody knows - synkro' without realizing it and 'vvv - emeute' is one of my tunes of the year.

http://futuregarageforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8

Tracklist:

Submerse - Everything Around Us [L2S Recordings]
Synkro - Everybody Knows [Smokin Sessions]
Clueless - Secret Love [forthcoming Night Audio]
Sully - Phonebox [Frijsfo Beats]
Whistla - What You Want [L2S Recordings]
Sines - Love Becomes She [Untitled!]
Submerse - Forgive Me [forthcoming Night Audio]
Burial - Unite [Soul Jazz]
Whistla - Steelface [L2S Recordings]
Kanvas - Next [forthcoming on L2S Recordings]
Duncan Powell - Care 4 Me (Whistla Remix) [forthcoming as a free download from http://thepushep.blogspot.com ]
M2J - Blue Tone [L2S Recordings]
Littlefoot - Alien Wet Dream [L2S Recordings]
KingThing - Trapped [forthcoming on Night Audio]
Naphta - Soundclash (Grievous Angel Remix) [forthcoming on Keysound]

Link: http://dubfiler.com/373736c543a8

Of those I know "Phonebox" (and "Unite") best and I understand why it might be called "future garage" (well, the "garage" bit anyway!).

Commenting on one track alone is dangerous but though I love Sully probably the biggest stumbling block for him is politeness - probably emphasised by the dinky finesse of his 2-step rhythms. I'm still waiting for him to do another tune as hooky as "Give Me Up".

I'll check the mix...

hold tight on the mix and check this i think you'll like it...

http://dubstepped.net/index.php/2009/03/vvv-emeute/

I totally geek out about syncopation, as evidenced by this thread: boom chicka boom: Rolling Beats, Rhythms, Drums n Handclaps Thread

Will have to wait until I go home tonight unfortunately...

Rev, so do I! Though I don't have the knowledge or the patience to really break them down in the way that thread does.

the thing about uk funky is in some ways it feels so much less alien for dancing than 2step did ... it seems like it should be a much easier crossover. instead i think the problem is that the audience likely to pay attention to funky is looking for ... complex programming as some sort of ultimate goal of the music or something (not speaking to anyone specifically here, necessarily) rather than looking at the music from a dancer's perspective, it's investigated as, like, science.

^^^^

A lot of people who got into garage did the same thing. The conventional wisdom that makes Dem 2, Steve Gurley and El-B the heroes of the genre is largely based on it.

I think this is kinda why so many internet types rate these successive British genres like so: jungle >> dubstep = grime >> 2-step >> funky.

that is so very close to absolutely backwards

For me it's like 2-step = funky = jungle > grime >>>>> dubstep

My favourite grime moments are up there with the previous three groups but there were less of them.

I'd say funky > 2-step = jungle > grime > dubstep with the caveats of this being entirely reflective of when I discovered all this stuff, and that if you're going to give me beats I can't do dance to, do by all means rap on them

if you're going to give me beats I can't do dance to, do by all means rap on them

OTM

to paraphrase one of my favorite ilx posts ever, if it ain't srs dancing then there shld be srs lyrics. this is how i judge music

I pronounce "srs" as "surrious" in my mind

uk funky is ok but jess & crabbe did it first and better

actually i'm sort of disappointed because there's a new jess & crabbe tape and there's no uk funky on it, just wall to wall fidget house and some remixed baile funk

uk funky jess & crabbe is ok good but jess & crabbe basement jaxx did it first and better

Fixed

Although heaps of UK funky sounds like neither.

touché

by the way, I made that ill blu aaliyah remix itunes friendly:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vbkpsi

I think a really key thing to keep in mind regarding Funky is that a lot of it is House made for people who grew up on Dancehall/Bashment and Grime. And I love House, and wouldn't give a shit if 90% of Dancehall had never been recorded. Thats probably due to some degree of ignorance on my part, I live a long ways away from Jamaica both geographically and culturally.

So while I enjoy the broken beat elements that are still sort of present in Funky, and I like the melange of Grime and House very much, its those goddamn snares that have started to irritate me after a while. I like short sharp staccato music, I've got enough of an affinity with 2-step to value the ways that it was programmed, it just seems to be (as Tim has said) a very different sort of rhythm all together in Funky. As someone who enjoys mixing House and Disco, those swung snares fuck with me in all kinds of ways.

I'm not the greatest DJ, and I'm aware that you should treat a lot of these tunes like riddims instead of tracks, but I'm not really looking for that in music right now. You add in the fact that there's not a great deal of interest in my area for anything outside of Top 40 DJs and maybe a little pop Electrohouse and there's not a lot of incentive to try and become Wisconsin's first UK Funky DJ. I'll play Calabria or something at a house party, but the only conceivable club that would have me play this stuff in town is an African restaurant. I could probably say the same if I lived on the coasts, I really don't see this stuff ever breaking in the US.

That being said I'd say its going to go mainstream in the UK given enough time. I'm guessing by the summer of 2011, there's just too many talented people and too much Pop sensibility for it to get squashed down like Grime did in the early days. I'm probably missing out on a lot of great music, but there's just too much great disco that I haven't heard yet.

And I say this as someone who is completely disenchanted with both Grime and Dubstep at this point. I've got a lot of love for the people making Dubstep, just not a lot interest in sinking the rest of my 20s down that rabbit hole knowing that it'll mostly end up sounding like Evol Intent sooner rather than later. Most of the smart producers have long since transitioned to House and Techno crossover territory long since. Or to not-quite-Funky enough for Tim.

Damn, not in great form for grammar today. One too many "long since"s.

I think a really key thing to keep in mind regarding Funky is that a lot of it is House made for people who grew up on Dancehall/Bashment and Grime.

This is probably otm. For me, my love of funky, at least initially, was an outgrowth of my love of Afro-Carribean music, although I was more into reggaeton than into dancehall or soca. Around 2007, reggaeton was threatening to go some very interesting places rhythmically, but ended up going in more sonically conservative directions that didn't appeal to me. For an example of what I'm talking about, here is what was probably my favorite single of that year, "No Te Veo" by Casa de Leones, (which I talked about in the thread I linked earlier). Note that not only does it jack the 90 BPM reggaeton beat up to a house-like tempo of around 120, but it totally fucks your standard BOOM-ch-boom-chk BOOM-ch-boom-chk by throwing in six snares per bar, rather than your usual four, including an unheard of snare on the 1. This adds an additional level of syncopation not present in most reggaeton, and that's before you even account for the counter-rhythmic guitar line. It comes out sounding pretty damn close to funky house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbbZTs8wJM

Right in the middle of my obsession with that track, "Calabria" dropped, then right while was obsessed with "Calabria", "Do You Mind" came out, and those were total short hops. As I discovered more funky tracks, it become apparent that funky was going all the places rhythmically that I was hoping reggaeton would before it became apparent that the in thing would be cheesy, played-out electro-house stylings.

Those "goddamn snares" are exactly what I want to dance to!

Well I wouldn't mind dancing to them at all!

I just don't want to spend the next 2 or 3 years of my life trying to learn how to mix the little bastards like Marcus Nasty does. There's no outlet for it, and please if there's someplace in the greater Chicago area that I can go to dance to Funky let me know. Because I'm not flying to New York just to see the Night Slugs or whatever.

Its not that I hate the music at all, its that its highly unlikely to ever be worth my while to love it. This time last year I was busy helping interview Roska and Cooly G. I really want all these people to do well!

But I've already pored 3 or 4 years of my life into Grime and then Dubstep to absolutely no return whatsoever.

I've got a really nice record collection, but other than that I kind of wish I'd spent more time out dancing.

Ah, I see. As a non-dj, I don't have those issues.

As a Portlander, my options of ever hearing any of this stuff out are probably well slimmer than someone in the Chicago area. :(

"Portlander" - I've lived here for 3 months

You could probably make it down to SF though. There might be something going on down there.

Thats where the only US based Funky producer that I can think of is based.

It occurs to me that I did have a return from writing about Dubstep, I met some really great people online.

But there's genuinely no market for hyper specialized dance music critics right now. Its almost completely occupied by the posters on ILX. Not that thats a bad thing entirely, between Tim and Kiran Sande I'm not sure why I even bother having opinions at all.

xp Who's that? I would totally aim to be the second if I could get FL Studio to run properly.

Anyway, SF is a bit far off to go to just to party.

http://www.solosrecords.com/africanrhythms.html

As far as I know he's from SF. I might be confused though.

Most of the smart producers have long since transitioned to House and Techno crossover territory long since. Or to not-quite-Funky enough for Tim.

^^^otm. which is why tim's continued dubstep grinch-ness makes no sense whatsoever any more, b/c...like, which bits of "dubstep" are you talking about? the worst bits, i'm right there grinching with you, i was never really a dubstep head at all for good reason. but the bits bleeding out elsewhere - house, techno, funky, pop - i really love, as well as the more melodically interesting guido/ikonika end of stuff.

i think i took to funky so easily because i already loved house/techno, r&b/dancehall and the general uk bass umbrella, and to find something which synthesised them all was really amazing.

If I could go to those nights, and not just read about them on Facebook or on FACT I'd be there.

But I'm a little sick of pining for London, and being too broke to ever visit because I keep spending my money on pricey imported vinyl. Or in Funky's case loads of badly mastered Mp3s. Why does anyone in my position really even need to know who Ill Blu is? When I'm still trying convince my best friends that dance music isn't boring?

If you think indie's influence is oppressive in London Lex, you'd never survive in the Midwest.

haha london is the one place i don't find indie's influence to be oppressive. it's oppressive in critical circles on the internet, not IRL.

seeing as this is where we're talking about bok bok et al right now, i can highly recommend his new mix - http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2010/01/bok-bok-jan-2010-mix.html

Haha, did I mention I grew up in Seattle? Fleet Fuxxor central. (PDX is a bit crunchier/punker.)

Why does anyone in my position really even need to know who Ill Blu is?

For your own enjoyment? That's generally why I seek out new music.

Sorry, I'm literally surrounded by several hundred pounds of vinyl right now.

I could listen to all of it for years and never get bored, there's just so much stuff to listen to.

Enough about me, I've gotten all drama queen in Tim's lovely thread. Carry on.

can some1 post

Lloyd - Girls Around The World (Ill Blu Remix)?

thx <3

Here you go jordan:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vwxp5n

^^^otm. which is why tim's continued dubstep grinch-ness makes no sense whatsoever any more, b/c...like, which bits of "dubstep" are you talking about? the worst bits, i'm right there grinching with you, i was never really a dubstep head at all for good reason. but the bits bleeding out elsewhere - house, techno, funky, pop - i really love, as well as the more melodically interesting guido/ikonika end of stuff.

Not really grinching about it though, am I? Acknowledging that dubstep is mostly not on a level with funky for me is hardly grinching given funky is my favourite music ever basically. I've already written up one dubstep track here and there are a couple more inclusions in the pipeline...

There's a certain shall we say dubstep-listener-mentality (which is basically the inheritor of the IDM-listener-mentality) which I grinch about, sure - at least as it applies to funky. And if you say I'm imagining it then I'd say you have a massive case of Night Slugs-induced willful blindness!

Donae'o - Watching Her Move (Ill Blu Remix):

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ge22o8

Sticky ft. Natalie Storm - Look 'Pon Me
http://www.sendspace.com/file/824y9a

One thing that really got me into dancehall in the first part of the decade was a certain kind of relentless riddim: riddims whose bracing physicality made their persistence across several DJ voicings in a mix something of a (highly enjoyable) endurance test. Like: "can you keep dancing to this? Can you take it?" The dancehall-fusionist end of funky is running with this vibe for obvious reasons: funky's frenetic pace and its additive approach to its arrangements (the addition and subtraction of maybe about six elements (both percussive and melodic) across the course of the track) make the endless extension of a single groove as weirdly exciting prospect as it was in the more frantic dancehall mixes.

Funky has also spurred the dramatic re-emergence of Jamaican toasting in UK dance music, after grime effectively sidelined the practice some time in 2002. Most tellingly, artists who were hot property at the tail end of garage and then basically disappeared or moved into other genres (Ms Dynamite, Lady Stush) have suddenly become scene fixtures again, and given much of this end of funky resembles the heavy, soca-tinged sound of a lot of 2001 era garage, it's as if funky has literally gone back to 2001 in order to start pushing this vibe into a new direction after it was prematurely curtailed. Females dominate (not just via Dynamite and Stush; see also efforts from Lady Chann, Shystie and Tifa), I suspect because the aggression of the female dancehall DJ is always so sexual, always a check on testosterone as much as a goad for it. Unlike many male grime rappers, say, female dancehall DJs always balance their seriousness with levity; and in some ways the inescapable fleshiness of their performances point back to the sensuality which this brand of funky - as a house X dancehall hybrid - was always going to secrete in buckets.

Sticky has been at the forefront of this trend, with about four different riddims that have attracted various voicings from Jamaican or Jamaican-tinged UK vocalists. The Jumeirah riddim is perhaps the most well-known because it's the most riddim-qua-riddim: where other Sticky productions have been dominated by a particular voicing (e.g. Fugitive Riddim by Lady Chann's "Your Eye Too Fast", though don't sleep on Maxwell D's "Text Text Text"), Jumeirah is somehow too relentless, too murderous to allow a single voicing to pin it down. Proudly simple, Jumeirah basically features a straightforward five-snare-beats-per-bar rhythm pattern and alternating successions of violin and cello riffs in a palsied hop from treble to bass and back again. Nothing else. But it doesn't matter: the heaviness of the tune is more than enough to captivate.

Natalie Storm can't claim to have made Jumeirah her own, but she makes a great stab at it on "Look 'Pon Me", which basically matches the myopic intensity of the music with a similarly one-note (in the best way) performance. There's no spaces in her voicing, it's just an endless onslaught of calm (almost indifferent) dismissals of her many femme challengers: "My man never gonna leave my sight 'cos / me 'bout the fat fat pum pum!" The faster tempos of funky seem to inspire the kind of studied monotone intensity which Natalie offers here; it sounds like it should be boring but instead it's fascinating, implying a sort of fembot implacability that matches the music beat for beat.

i hope the reso - temjin EP is in your pipeline Tim. in my books and across any genre he's hands down the best drum producer kickin it at the mo.

so whats nightslugs induced willful blindness all about ? is that bok bok and zomby still spewing that no one recognized their genius in the early DSF daze. oh how they must be laughing now...lose the attachment, lose the stress :)

I just meant lex's "dubstep, funky, it's all one" PLUR stance.

In truth I found Bok Bok and L-Vis's "Night Slugs Dubplates 2009" mix a dispiriting slug but I'm hoping this new January set is better.

About to check out that VVV track.

Dispiriting slog, I mean.

Yes! That Natalie Storm track is a belter.

i'm gonna check out the nightslugs jan mix too. i so hope bok bok's tunes aren't shit, especially given the big ups lex gave him in his 'ones to watch this year' piece. then again you're bound to think my taste dubious if you think vvv is a bucket of poo too

swings and roundabouts really. i get so dizzy bout this time of year:)

"look pon me" is amazing - really great to hear the jumeirah riddim vocalled appropriately, and to see the sticky riddim + female dancehall mc triptych ("bad gyal", "your eye too fast", "look pon me") completed. tim, did you ever hear stush's "we nuh run" over hard house banton's "sirens"? soooo incredible.

There's a certain shall we say dubstep-listener-mentality

yeah but doesn't every genre have a certain listening mentality that can be kinda closed to elements of other genres? pop-listener-mentality, indie-listener-mentality, techno-listener-mentality...and to an extent a lot of those have been resistant to uk funky (for all variations of it) too.

couple of my fav bok bok productions -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q1tyBu-Aa4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imDpCazJbV0

i prob rate him more as a dj at this point (though he's only done a few remixes/productions), but he and l-vis have just started up the night slugs label, and what's imminent on that is really, really tantalising...

nice to see that Jam City refix of Endgame's 'Ectsasy' on that Bok Bok mix

oh dont mind me lex:) i'm still waiting for kode9 to blossom and for what it's worth, i'm still not sold on funky either. like if Tim's selections are the cream of the crop there must be truckloads of chaff out there. Is there and if so, how about a 5 worst funky tunes of last year ?

This debate is getting really really boring given that Tim and Lex basically agree, except one is is talking primarily about bedroom listeners who are resistant to dancing and the other is talking about people who actually go to clubs.

The VVV track is very nice, very pretty. Some of this kinda stuff reminds me a bit of the last Luomo album, esp. "Slow Dying Places" - but what pushes Luomo over the edge for me is his maximalist inventiveness, whereas Sully, "Emeute" etc. tend towards the relatively restrained, in spite of the lush wafty melodicism.

Anyway the dancehall-ish MC I most want to hear over a funky track is Doctor, of Gotta Man fame. Actually a funky remix of Gotta Man itself would do nicely.

Though the distinction is a relative one e.g. I really like Sully vs Luomo's was my number 3 album in 2008.

Matt! Haven't you heard Doctor's "Funky Dance"??!?!?!?

I've only got it as part of a DJ mix but I will upload it for you as it's pretty amazing. And a great example of the fact that, contrary to popular opinion, funky skanks are not at all crap.

As a side note, the notion of the crap funky skanks is a bit like the notion of boring minimal - it's overstated because it seems like the sorta thing that would be correct, more than because it's actually true at all. No-one can name actually bad skanks apart from "Ring-A-Rosy" and "Are You Gonna Bang Doe".

A quick search reveals I probably have - is that the "Migraine! Gully Creepa!" one? If so then yeah that's great.

Had no idea it was him though! I'm not very good at keeping track of individual tracks on funky mixes.

Doctor - Funky Dance:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xp1neo

Yes that's the one.

lol @ dispiriting slugs

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/jjharringman/2008/02/28/snorting_slugs.jpg

The middle bit of that Bok Bok mix, where it goes all ravey, is fantastic. Altogether though it's a bit... monochrome? I always feel stuff like this is on the verge of tipping over into the blokier end of breaks though.

first track (Mr Mageeka) starts off pretty BPitchy imo

the full version of mosca's "nike" (about a third of the way through) is pretty incredible btw - it's dropping in a couple of weeks

i like pretty songs and pretty ugly songs and not much in between.

am currently loving drunkenly singin along to 'r-les - gibberish' with my kids voice altering toy megaphone

RichGirl - He Ain't Wit' Me Now (Tho)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7smyb5

It always seems slightly weird to just listen to "He Ain't Wit' Me Now (Tho)" rather than watch the clip on youtube - so much of the "woah" factor for me is now tied up with watching the video clip for the first time, seeing the intensity of the four singers, the camera seeming to shudder in time with the music. The clip reflects the song and the song the clip: this is probably the most assaulting R&B track since "Caught Out There" or even En Vogue's "Free Your Mind", both of which it vaguely resembles at times.

Not that RichGirl ever resort to screaming, but somehow the stabbing piano chords, the blaring string riffs and the four singers' general FIERCENESS gives the impression that they're really fucking angry about something. So it's odd to discover, on closer inspection, that "He Ain't Wit' Me Now (Tho)" (how great is that title) is actually just about cutting loose in the club despite being in a relationship. I kinda get this, and I get the anger: it strikes me as being fuelled by half-resenting the person you're in a relationship with for "not letting" (i.e. making you feel guilty about your occasional desire to) you have fun (by, like, being promiscuous, at least socially). RichGirl basically demand that other people assuage their - they acknowledge, unfair anger - by flirting with them. And yeah, maybe it's not fair or rational, but it feels real to me (translation: I've probably done this once or twice), though I'm not sure how much fun it would be actually to dance with these ladies when they're in this state - you'd be on tenterhooks for sure.

It's not easy, too, to ignore the music, its orchestral bombast and juddering groove the kind of mountain that would give less confident nightmares - "how can we sing over THAT?" I've never heard the song played in a club, which may be because local R&B DJs aren't worth a jot, or may be because DJs intuitively understand the music may actually intimidate the dancefloor to a standstill. But even with everything turned up to 11, there's still subtlety at work here, like that final, push-over-the-edge addition of seething synthesisers for mere seconds at the song's final climax - which makes me wonder if producer Richcraft had more in his arsenal he didn't employ. What's easy not to notice is how great the lyrics are, instead just being overwhelmed by the force of their general impression.

First things first, let me tell you how I feel
'Cos yeah it's official and yeah it's all real
And yeah he my man and yo, yeah I'm feelin' it
But boy you so cute tonight, the two 'aint got to trip...

I love the staged aggression with which the song lays down the groundrules and then obliterates them, culminating with the (histrionically delivered) promise in the bridge, "tonight just watch me, watch me, watch me shake shake off the handcuffs!" Like many of the best R&B tracks about getting down in the club (e.g. "Yeah" but not "Love In This Club"), "He Ain't Wit' Me Now (Tho)" turns having fun into a kind of moral referendum; all pleasure is experienced under the shadow of the axe of judgment, which just makes it sweeter, a transgression to be savored for every last drop.

Delerious ft. Sweetness - Truthful
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5dyrl7

I discovered Delerious' "Truthful" via DJ Footloose's amazing 4 hour funky show on 1xtra, which ended just before the end of last year. This was a sad event, as (though I couldn't listen as often as I liked) it's hard to think of a show that was more enthusiastically comprehensive in its attempts to present the spectrum of funky, as fond of the style's roots in "proper" house as it was curious about its turn-offs and cul-de-sacs - e.g Footloose was I think the first big DJ to push Cooly G, long before Hyperdub got wind of her. As r|t|c noted a couple of times, one of the best aspects of Footloose's show was his tendency to sandwich dichotomous tracks together: grinding tribal rhythm numbers up against smooth house rollers up against sweetly percussive R&B-influenced tracks. His ecumenical approach meant he often picked up on tracks that other DJs ignored.

I like to imagine that Footloose saw in "Truthful" the same qualities that I see: its warmth, its near mournful raveyness, which often makes me imagine being in a rammed club and unable to really move except keep dancing, but seeing your crush or lover or whatever slip out the door and not being able to follow. Without sounding strictly like it, "Truthful" specifically reminds me of the finest Artful Dodger work, which (let's be clear) fell into this very narrow category of winsome depressive beauty, like a frail stunner whose sadness and clear need of a hero only makes her seem more desirable - so this means a lonely high-pitched synth melody, a rueful xylophone hook, a sympathetic bassline, and a rather weak-willed sounding diva sighing, "Oh I, I never loved a boy, I love as much as you, I never loved a boy... My love is so truthful..." Although occasionally this makes me think she's soothing a paranoid, jealous boyfriend with his fist in the air, mostly "Truthful" resembles the overpowering first flush of love that does away with any possible sense of independence.

What pushes this into "outright greatness" territory is how the production plays with these elements, using EQ and slight adjustments of the arrangements (now sudden flickers of horns in the background, now a semi-tragic new synth chord, now a slight electro tinge to the bass, now a chorus of divas wordlessly cooing in the background) to take its basic motifs through various stages of light and shadow, hopefulness and hopelessness - will her lover hear her pleas, or will they fall on death ears? The magic and the pathos of "Truthful" lie in how the tune itself doesn't know, balanced on the edge of delight and despair.

yeah thats amazing -- the propulsive woozy tropicalia of it kinda reminds me of euophira (nino's dream) in a weird way

I'm glad you like it deej, though I think anyone who didn't would be alien to me forever.

"truthful" is amazing, so big - such a rush.

tim have you heard the crazy cousinz remix of booty luv's "say it"?

also, delerious' ardsoul ep from last year is also recommended - no vox but "bombatta" is as huge and space-filling as "truthful", and "mocking bird" balances really well between a daydreamy flute line + crunching bass

last.fm is autocorrecting scrobbles of delerious to a christian rock band ;_;

Yeah the 'Ardsoul' EP was good!

I've heard the "Booty Luv" remix but am having difficulty recreating it in my head (except in a general generic imaginary Crazy Cousinz sense).

propulsive woozy tropicalia

This neat summation kinda renders my whole review redundant. Spot on.

Would be interested to get suggestions of other tracks with the same vibe as "Truthful" (in 2-step terms, the space between the Artful Dodger remix of Valerie M's "Tingles 2000" and the Club Asylym remix of Kristine's "Loveshy") - whether funky or other genres.

NB. The Crazy Cousinz remix of Platnum's cover of "Loveshy" is v. good and quite close, but doesn't feel like it counts to me, perhaps because as a cover of a song literally in the style all I can hear is how it distances itself from that vibe a little bit.

Dennis Ferrer - Hey Hey
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vf8g4t
Why is Ferrer always so good? It’s the thick voluptuousness of his grooves, I think, more nuanced and idiosyncratic and (yet) populist than most of his US house peers, but fatter and wetter than almost anything from Europe. It's a mark of Ferrer's ubiquitous reliability that his is the most, um, "accomplished" sounding music (give or take a top-shelf Quentin Harris production) I hear at gay clubs, and then the most catchy music I hear at sophisticated tech-house nights. We don't necessarily all love each other, but we all love Ferrer. Well, unless you're disinterested in perfect anthems.

"Hey Hey" reminds me somewhat of Ferrer’s prior, amazing "Church Lady", partly because it’s a vocal anthem, and partly because both tunes are distinguished by their capacity to use every single component rhythmically; on the slightly cooler (as in less warm, steelier) Hey Hey this trick is reminiscent of Carl Craig on his more anthemic excursions. But as with most recent Craig, this is not at all ostentatiously percussive a la UK funky or lots of minimal or whatever, it's just that every element is crucial to the slithery vibe of the groove. Both producers can make relatively simple tunes that sound utterly distinctive because their philosophy is imprinted deeply on every element, every stray sound.

So we're talking, from the syncopated main synth bleep loop to the pattering snares to the captivating counter-rhythm of metallic sounds like a hailstorm lashing a tin roof (Ferrer allowing the storm to grow more and less bluntly bludgeoning over time, like a rogue surgeon wielding a scalpel now delictately, now cruelly) to the syncopated, jazzy female vocal with its dancefloor-destroying scatting, everything is secretly rhythm. And then there's the gratuitously excellent (and again Craig-ish) portentous strings and THX space bass, just to remind you that, yeah, this guy is on top of everything.

oooh that is really thrilling. great effects!

holy shit, i'd go insane if i head this out!

i did when i did! AND I HEARD U SAY~~~~

that's vivien goldman on vox, that is.

more essential d.ferrer from last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmaQpKxb95Y

Admittedly the last couple of times I've been out to gay clubs they haven't played Ferrer or Ferrer type music (wall to wall Le Roux et. al. :-( even more crushing than the US experience in 'A Gayzy Shade Of Winter') - BUT last year I danced to "Church Lady" and (I think) "Touched The Sky" at a summer foam party and that's on again in a few weeks so here's hoping it'll all be warm melodramatic house again.

that record reminds me a lot of carl craig's remix of beanfield's "tides"....but not sure I like it was much as that!

Yeah it's a lot like the Tides remix, I agree.

yeah the structure and the way in which it works...there are v few other records like that.

that's not good news

What, that it's like the Tides record or that there are v few other records like that?

v few others

never heard anything like this either

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkR6-c_xkBg

seemed on topic kinda but really i just love that

Youtube doesn't load for me at work - what is it?

ayumi hamasaki carl craig remix

uh, part of me

Have not heard that!

u def should then but i kinda thought you had heard everything by now

anyway that youtube cuts it in half, needs to be heard in its 8 1/2 minute fullness

I will attend to this at home.

touch the sky was my fav off that album although church lady was all ppl in chicago seemed to play (when i was going to more house clubs about a year or two ago)

quentin harris remix of "touched the sky" <3 <3 <3

"Touched The Sky" is my favourite on that album too - though in more stentorian moods I love most of all the stripped down bangingness of "Transitions". Would say the original and QH remix of "Touched The Sky" are about equal in quality.

Hey Hey is an incredible record. I saw a dancefloor full of people go apeshit to it in December. It's because it sounds so cold and cavernous and metallic and then this rich, warm vocal just pours into the gaps, and then the whole crowd gets to do the "Hey! Hey!" call and response bit. In the hands of a lesser producer that chorus would feel a bit corny but Ferrer's actually quite restrained with it, he never over-eggs the pudding.

sooner or later I'll get around to listening to all of these

One super amazing Ferrer production from a few years ago that gets slept on way too much is "A Drum Stick and a Light Fixture" under the Son of Raw moniker. Totally slamming.

i didn't know there were son of raw tracks other than "a black man in space"! (SEARCH: sax mix of that.)

Yeah there's quite a few!

Obv both versions of "A Black Man In Space" are amazing.

amazingly, i DID actually hear this at optimo tonight! and i lost it.... but i'm still home at half one, for reasons out of my control.

even more amazingly (to me, at least, ha) when it started i was like "is this that beanfield remix?" no kidding.

i have to admit, that i came home and googled - "ordinary day" "i heard you say" - trying to find out what track this was before i realised that i had heard it for the first time that very night. this says more about my brain than it does about this track though! am quite drunk now, cheers all the same.

but what it DOES say about the track is that it sounds like a very familiar, almost classic, track a few listens in.

Me, Tim, 2009. enough said!

D-Lo - Hardest In The Bay
http://www.sendspace.com/file/grosmi

I've delayed writing about a D-Lo track because I kept changing my mind regarding which one I wanted to write about/upload. This is rare for me w/r/t rap albums/mixtapes where I usually choose one or two tracks I love mot of all pretty quickly (though maybe it's a 2009 thing 'cos I'm having the same problem with Lil' Boosie), but it's also a roundabout endorsement of D-Lo's DJ Fresh-helmed mixtape 'The Tonite Show' (yeah, the same name as all the rest of DJ Fresh's mixtapes), which I've returned to me pretty much constantly these last few months, always with a different favourite. So I ended up choosing "The Hardest In The Bay", off DJ Fresh's "own" multi-artist mixtape 'The Tonite Show', just to break the deadlock.

Anyway so D-Lo is part of the new (or "new"?) Bay Area rap scene which appears to have grown out of hyphy, and which I'm in no way equipped to talk about knowledgeably - check Deej's piece here instead.

http://somanyshrimp.com/2010/01/13/the-new-bay/

D-Lo's voice is kind of squeaky and breathless and tinged with ridicule, like he's always rolling his eyes at you or something, with a bit of Cee-Lo's high-pitched desiccation, but rubbery or elastic and gruff at the same time. This sounds like it might become annoying, and on D-Lo's big hit "No Hoe" the unhingedness of it all does bug me at times, at least on the chorus (or sometimes it's brilliant, but it depends on when I'm listening), but it's also a big part of the guy's appeal - the D-Lo mixtape closer "Blaaat!" really emphasises this, pushing the weirdness of D-Lo's flow and the lurching post-hyphy groove of "No Hoe" to an almost unworkable extreme. But he's also great with a straightforwardly mnemonic chorus, the wheezy edges of his voice like grappling hooks latching onto your ears and imprinting his almost sing-song rhymes in your head.

DJ Fresh has a couple of different styles, switching easily between the sparse but spacey post-hyphy of stuff like "Blaaat!" and histrionic, austere synth numbers like "The Hardest In The Bay" and "U Already Know Doe", and then sometimes pitch-perfect evocations of eighties electro-funk. What distinguishes "The Hardest In The Bay" is the gorgeous contrast between the glassy synthetic trumpets and the lazily funky rhythms that skip across the surface of the track with laconic grace. It's a typically odd-but-perfect foil for D-Lo, who can't help but undercut the widescreen solemnity of the music with his asthmatic incredulity. And does he really compare the track to duplo, or am I imagining that?

wow, just catchin up with "hey hey"

1000% cosign on apeshit-inducing qualities - it's like DJ Koze doing deep house!

and "julia" is mindblowing - i listened to it before i read your thoughts, tim, and i'm sort of glad i did - it took me completely by surprise

dlo is great yeah

i like how dj fresh kinda stretched out & tried different styles for that particular record

i think i implied in my bay roundup that there werent many good mcs which isnt what i meant really -- more that enjoying the scene relies on a lot of other factors
i didnt even mention guys like messy marv or newcomers like dlo & sleepy d

JULIA, JULIA

i dunno how tim finds the time to listen to all this stuff. enviable amount of attention being paid here.

Boy Better Know - Too Many Man (Jamie Duggan Remix)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q6id8v

I feel bad about how I dropped bassline so quickly and thoroughly when I fell in love with UK Funky - it really was like going out on a few dates with someone you thought was really nice and interesting and could grow to love, then just abandoning them in the middle of a restaurant to follow an object of obsessive infatuation, not returning calls, being a dick in general. Every now and then I pop back in to see what I've been missing. My sense is that the scene, denied the limelight since, oh, "What's It Gonna Be" I guess, has quietly becoming more itself - the beats more stiff and stringent, the synths more shrill and sickly, the bass more turgid and rumbling and ominous, the tunes in their general constuction more oddball and threadbare. This is the kind of development picked up on and given significance by connoisseurs rather than outsiders, who just hear what they heard before, only more of it. Needless to say, I'd have difficulty wrapping my observations into some purply prosy grand unifying theory.

The other thing that bassline seems to have been doing is growing more hip hop - more tunes are dominated by MCs and the MCs dominate the tunes more than they did. The bassline MCs I'm most aware of - J Star, Slick Don, MC Bones - usually have a pinched, scrappy feel, like they're hectoring you for forgetting to include them in your dinner plans, and it sounds perfect over the harsh right angles and blaring textures of the music, which similarly can feel like it's being abrasively ugly just to spite you a bit (but not too much). Which makes a bassline remix of "Too Many Man" an excellent idea. The histrionic, masculine grime X funky of the original always seemed a little misguided to me, and not merely because its message ("We need some more girls in here! There's too many man too many many man!") was apt to get lost in all the bluff and bluster. Moreover, funky's appeal is always defined by its relationship to house's swing however tenuous and stretched it might become, a factor towards which Boy Better Know appeared entirely oblivious.

Bassline doesn't suffer from this problem: despite (or perhaps because of) it being so squarely in the pocket with respect to its straight-down-the-line 4X4 beat, it has simply no relationship with house swing whatsoever, the rhythm structure providing basically a skeletal framework (and it is skeletal: the slashing snares are usually ten times louder than the kicks), so Boy Better Know's furrow-browed raps sound organically suited to their new environment, although perhaps now nervous and paranoid more than aggressively whingey. Duggan's remix is barely a track, more like a succession of percussive samples, rumbling bass riffs and queasy synth arpeggios that sound like they met eachother for the first time as they arrived at your ears. The effect is a kind of straining instability, like the rappers have to keep staring at the floor and chanting to themselves just to hold onto the basic groove, to prevent the arrangement from floating away into nauseous insubstantiality. That probably makes the tune sound bad, but that couldn't be further from the truth; it's one of the fascinating qualities of bassline that all of its appeals are grounded in a thoroughgoing ugliness. In this context, the chorus becomes something of a pained self-realisation: What have we become? Where have the girls gone? Will we ever feel normal again?

as far as i've heard you're quite right about modern bassline itself (i was actually pretty humbled and impressed by how little it's changed - bit like finding out the spurned fellow you've felt so guilty about all these years is doing quite fine and barely even remembers you and your narcissistic one nighter, to extend yr metaphor) but in terms of uk funky haven't you been missing a speculative trick lately wrt how marcus nasty's been harnessing bassline's energy? (ie something like 70% of recent sets revealed as being of bassline producer origin once the soundcloud tracklisting emerged.) i'm not thinking sonically or structurally necessarily - though there are elements of that too - but perhaps more along psychological lines too, a consonant impulse. it just seems like something stronger than simply the aptitude of moonlighting producers.

(at the same time one could also make a worthwhile compare-and-contrast with the failures of the overdesiring seb chew/marcus set, and form some sort of dialectical triangulation that PROVES "real funky" exists, which it clearly does obv.)

don't really know why i'm posting this here (tricking myself back into posting while not feeling very typey most probably) - feel free to cut & paste onto funky thread.

Ha ha yeah well what's funny is I've been thinking exactly the same thing - why is it that bassline producers seem to "get it" so instinctively, Bass Boy and Screama and Naughty Raver just slotting into the upper echelons of funky producers without sounding forced or overthought or particular about it whatsoever. But as you point to, it's so seamless that it's hard come up with a conceptual framework for the phenomenon at this stage, so every time I've thought of raising the issue I've refrained on the grounds of the triangulation angle being the main fruitful line of inquiry while also being under a Denkverbot.

Interestingly, Tom Lea at Fact's been trying to organise a feature interviewing Marcus and his bassline orphans.

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f14/snouts/ggirl.gif

i'll look forward to that.

Kenton Slash Demon - Singla
http://www.sendspace.com/file/to5crv

If you danced to house last year there's a decent chance you danced to Kenton Slash Demon's "Khattabi", which you probably won't recognise now but you'd know if you heard it: the rattling, post-MFF groove; the wailing, stretched, vaguely subcontinental vocal sample; the bass guitar; the breakdown comprised of scary lurching Psycho strings; the irresistible drop. Great track, and one well suited to 2009 in the odd sense of being so 2004 revivalist, reminding listeners that "hey we still like those house tracks with the funny noises", and providing a refereshing counterweight in sets of strenuous deepness. It also helps that right now a lot of people are getting into this kind of house seemingly for the first time: "Khattabi" seems to be very popular with erstwhile dubstep DJs discovering the pull of a seductive house groove as if the world was young and new.

I think I slightly prefer "Singla" on the flip, which mines the some territory to even more mindboggling effect, featuring a groove so springloaded, so moist and bouncy, so itchy and scratchy and compulsive that it's like being inside a giant toy factory run by enthusiastic puppies. There's also some vaguely ethereal choral sighs in the background, and a weird ambient 'n' found sound breakdown, but these are mere garnishes for the main event - that groove, that amazing groove. "Singla" is a straighter track than "Khattabi" in some senses, ruling your life not with a canny sample or two or a well-executed drop but through the sheer "how do they do that" intensity of its rhythmic excess. Amazingly, with each return to the central groove the rhythm seems to mutate and mate with itself, sprouting effects and fripperies like weeds, a never-ending, perfectly orchestrated disaster that spreads and spreads. And like the best tunes of its type, it positively drips with the sense of fun that went into building it.

No one really needs this sound right now, but I'm glad that it's still around: these days it's easy to write off complex, micro-detailed production in dance music as a fad that's passed, which is true in some senses, but ignores the fact that at its best this hyper-detailed, hyper-percussive house sound seems to create its own logic of dancing, the endlessly changing same of the groove provoking in dancers a response of constant extension: the one time I've heard "Singla" played out me and my girls couldn't stop coming up with new moves in an attempt to do justice to the ruthless impatience of the music.

This is actually one of the songs I've heard already. The Khattabi "EP" (is it really an EP? It's got three songs on it..) sounds to me like a kind of Greek Pepe Bradock, somehow. The main track is fairly serious business and the other two are like more whimsical magnifications of certain aspects of it. I agree about the superiority of "Singla" - partially because it is more whimsical, but also because of the irresistable rhythm (maybe these two qualities are connected)? The groove is almost Akufen-like. I can imagine it just repeating with no changes for like five minutes and I'd still be feeling something new each go round.

wow that's great, just checked out their track Brunn on youtube and that's really good too. not a million miles away from that dOP/Noze ethno-jazzy sound but with a bit more oompf.

xp and yes, akufen too for sure

"khattabi" is def amazing

they r some indie band too apparently?

one of the guys is in a band called When Saints Go Machine - i've never heard them

ha, really? no wonder it reminded me of dOP, they did a great remix of a WSGM track, it was on DJ Koze's RA podcast