Tim's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread

one more time

Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable about posting download links here. Instead there'll be youtube links, plus you can join the equiv facebook group for download links (link to the group shortly).

preparing for statisfaction.

Drake - Fireworks (Deadboy Slo Mo House Edit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMgqdAPESY

Figures that one of my secret favourite songs of the year was a secret lush weepy house mix of Drake of all people that also secretly sounds like an anthem about a certain golfer - "Fireworks (Deadboy Slo Mo House Edit)" is a tune that piles together so many unlikelihoods that I suspect a lot of people check it out of sheer perverse curiosity. Of course it sounds like none of the things I just mentioned: basically this tune is about sonorous piano chords, gorgeously shuffling house percussion, bass as deep and still as a lake and layered high-pitched vocals delicately tiptoeing across a pleasure/pain tightrope stretched between twin peaks of relief and regret.

Recently I've become a bit suspicious of overly emotional dance-not-dance music, which sometimes strikes me as people endlessly reprising Aphex Twin's "Xtal" (classic tune don'tgetmewrong) and the like as an excuse for failing to, like, make people dance. Or, worse, Burial knock-offs. All without ever remotely coming close to the genuine, thrilling bittersweet sensuality of the real classics of the form - 2-step anthems, duh, from the Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" to the Artful Dodger's remix of Valerie M's "Tingles 2000".

Deadboy however comes very close here, and I suspect it's because he recognises that sadness in dance music is almost always best approached obliquely, as a kind of neccesary implication of whatever the tune gazes at directly: in this case, acres and acres of desire, and a certain awe-filled awareness of the accidental beauty of life, that kind of awareness that only hits home against a backdrop of loss. Or more bluntly: the e rush, flaring most gloriously in the moment before it dies.

Message Bookmarked

Fantasia - Man of the House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Nxpes6wgM

Fantasia's gotta be one of the best storytellers in pop. Not in terms of lyrics - though I doubt there's many songs in 2010 with better lyrics than "Man of the House", whether or not she wrote them - but in terms of exploiting the endless variety of tics and wavers and melismatic twists in her vocals to inject each line with just the right little bit of additional nuance to push the story along. In some ways her voice is a blunt instrument: she has no choice but to wield it in this matter, so inevitable is her slide into vocal over-signification. Or maybe the better analogy is a river: Fantasia's voice is like this unstoppable natural force that requires the right material to extract the best use out of it, and storytelling lyrics allow Fantasia all sorts of opportunities to flex her tremors, warbles and coos.

"See it's getting a little outta hand/cook, cleaning, providing, taking care of little man/you wanna talk about who's wearing the pants/(huh) baby well I don't understand..." she sings in the pre-chorus, and the put-on puzzlement is palpable, perfectly played even when you know she's putting it on and she knows that you know. There's the slightest wink in there, like she's inviting you to take a seat and watch her win this argument with her flawless pose of earnest reasonableness - and it's a mark of just how sympathetic Fantasia's voice (and by extension persona) is, that a song about what's reasonable in a domestic relationship can be so captivating.

I suspect nothing from Fantasia will move me quite so much as her grand final performance of "I Believe" on American Idol way back when, and in truth "Man of the House" is somewhat too restrained to be the perfect showcase of what Fantasia can do with a pop song, at least as compared to, say, her previous album's "When I See You". Whereas there Fantasia seemed to have a nervous breakdown on record, here she contents herself with some mildly OTT wailing and hollering in the song's final minute. But Fantasia can't (quite) subsist on nervous breakdowns alone, and the steely strength of "Man of the House" is as loveable for its everywoman approachability as those songs were for their unmistakability. As with "Single Ladies" (and Beyonce is surely the other great everywoman of contemporary pop in this regard) it's a song to be sung along to. People should sing along to it more.

"man of the house" is amazing.

Whereas there Fantasia seemed to have a nervous breakdown on record, here she contents herself with some mildly OTT wailing and hollering in the song's final minute

but the point of the song is that she's not going to have a nervous breakdown. "cuz if you can't, baby i can - i CAN and i WILL, so figure it out..."

also, it has to be said that her album, back to me, is one of the best r&b albums of 2010 - the los-produced "who's been lovin' you" and the star-spangled "falling in love tonight" are two more highlights.

Those were the other two I played with nominating instead. Love "The Thrill Is Gone" and "Collared Greens & Corn Bread" as well. Re "Man of the House", the point you identify was the point i was trying to make as well - but contrasting that to what I've previously loved in Fantasia tunes.

i love this performance of it, too.

That Fantasia album is one of the big slept-on pop releases of the year, does she even have a profile at all outside the US? It's a great record, maybe a bit cloying all in one sitting - once I get past Collared Greens & Corn Bread I kind of want to take a break. Although I might change my mind on that as December progresses, and Man of the House is probably my favourite thing on it.

The two tracks Lex mentions are both gorgeous as well even if they ape The-Dream's My Love and Cassie's Turn The Lights Off respectively. Possibly because they do.

bookmarking...

That Fantasia album is one of the big slept-on pop releases of the year, does she even have a profile at all outside the US?

as far as i can tell she has even less of a profile than jazmine sullivan outside the US. trying to drum up editorial interest in jazmine is some blood/stone ish - i just can't even face trying with fantasia ;_;

fucking hate rock criticism sometimes.

I'm gonna go ahead and post the art for that drake track because I think it's a great photo

http://i.imgur.com/JDa8p.jpg

also where's this facebook group

bookmarking, etc. Great post on Fantasia, I think there is so much to be said about the year she's had - both in terms of her music and her personal life and how they inform eachother, it's hard to listen to a song like "Bittersweet" and not put it in the context of her suicide attempt/relationship drama - and she is most definitely one of the great interpreters in music right now - a lot of people write off "melisma" as just showboating, but Fantasia (and Jazmine as well - "Redemption" in particular) is a great example how vocal runs and ad-libs really add to the impact and 'story' of a song. One of my favorite moments in music this year is in "Bittersweet," near the end when she says "my lord, my lord, my lord/it's bittersweet/oh love, love can hurt/love can hurt you sometimes... this shit is bittersweet"). There's just so much pathos in that passage, it's heart-wrenching. Her voice elevates the material, I don't think "Bittersweet" would've been as remarkable as it is were it sung by, say, Keyshia Cole or Melanie Fiona or someone like that, but in Fantasia's hands it feels like a new standard. Also, one of my fave Fantasia tracks this year that didn't make the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9rTKyn3Pwo

"Control Freak," Fantasia doing "sexy" in a way that is ACTUALLY SEXY. There's so much tension in this song, I can see the sweat when I listen to it!

That's not to mention "Collard Greens & Cornbread," "Teach Me," "I'm Doin' Me," etc. - yeah, the lack of critical attention paid to Fantasia is ridiculous (but not surprising - her last album which is also incredible was universally slept on).

sorry didn't mean to post a youtube in your youtube thread Tim

oh man, my favorite holiday tradition

^^^

Tim F, I love you.

^^^

postin' youtubes in tim's youtube threads, jordan's favourite holiday tradition

always misread the thread title as Time's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread which i think sounds sorta melancholy

i do hope all this love actually leads to people listening to the fantasia album

hoooooly shit @ that fantasia track, LOVE

i do hope all this love actually leads to people listening to the fantasia album

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Wednesday, December 8, 2010 12:26 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Downloading now. Hadn't heard anything of hers, but "Man of the House" has been on repeat since yesterday.

as much as i love fantasia's voice, i still haven't heard any of her own songs that didn't leave me completely nonplussed, this one encluded. i kinda wish she would take the retro-soul route tbh, as a contemporary r&b singer she bores me.

that drake rmx is great tho.

i didn't like either of these but i always LOVE this thread. thanks tim!

bookmarked etc. ;)

fantasia track is bangin thnx bro ^__^

Erykah Badu - Turn Me Away (Get Munny)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Jn3pcc178

My big philistine moment is not really getting Erykah's New Amerykah Part One, which I listened to heaps last year and just found uncomfortably desiccated sounding - something I accept was a conscious choice and is part of what makes the album interesting for so many people. It's not so much a stumbling block I have with Erykah herself, who I've always liked well enough, but with that whole sub-genre of post-Dilla scleroto-rap (and by extension scleroto-soul), whose aesthetic valorisation of queasiness is largely lost on my cloth ears.

There's been much less talk about New Amerykah Part Two, but for me this explicitly soft, svelte, generous sounding album (well, in relative terms) is much more to my taste, and no moment more so than "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)", possibly Erykah's breeziest moment ever, with its debauched funk bassline (the most recognisable element from Sylvia Striplin's "Can't Turn Me Away" and Junior M.A.F.I.A.'s "Get Money"), its soothing rhodes keys, its high pitched vocals and ridiculous lyrics and general vibe of playing at inconsequentiality - even, given the way it steals so much from its forebears, a surface level redundancy (which, needless to say, is entirely illusory). For me this works in a way that the rigorous consequentiality of Part One didn't so much, perhaps because the - shall we say - weightiness of Erykah's performances hardly needs foregrounding, and I just click with Erykah when she sneaks up on me with loveliness. Whereas the Striplin original floated across your consciousness with a gorgeous barely-there lightness of touch, "Turn Me Away" seems subtly to grow and expand and swell with each reiteration, like a message whose meaning starts off throwaway and then becomes more and more complex, more pregnant with significance as you keep reading into it a wealth of situations, contexts, resonances.

There's not really a message though: if the lyrics to the song are frequently funny, they're hardly the star of the show, which remains Erykah's voice as it adopts an endless succession of effects, modes and poses from model to robot girl. Even the song's central conceit, drawing both on an old disco-soul classic and the rap song that sampled it, is meta in a fairly carefree sense, its point being a kind of inclusive fondness for how hooks inhere despite being shaped and folded by the context and the purpose of their deployment ("can't turn me away"/"get money" becoming strictly equivalent earworm phrases). It's a song then, about the joy of performance itself, of performance that doesn't have to be about or for anything, but can remain compelling - intoxicating even - by virtue of its own self-delight. "Can't turn me away", Erykah insists time and time again, and maybe that's the message of the song: irresistibility is its own motive, and its own reward.

J Stalin - Money on the Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X-hfJfslsM

I loved J Stalin's album Prenuptial Agreement at the start of the year, then forgot about it for a long time, then discovered it again towards the end of the year, reminded of how awesomely massive and shimmering its sound can be, from the delicately stabbing "Birthday" to the morose squelches of "Red & Blue Lights" to the doomy "When The Club Over", halfway between club banger and Moroder's soundtrack for 'Metropolis'. Bay area rap usually strikes me as sounding like a mixture of millennial southern rap (plus Irv Gotti) and eighties r&b-funk revivalism (sometimes with a sweet whiff of cheese), but this album takes that sound closer to Cash Money to my ears, with its restless density, the groove always changing even as J Stalin mostly raps about hustling on the block with a certain monotonous urgency that reminds of B.G. a bit anyway.

That sense of changing same was pretty crucial to Cash Money material and it is to J Stalin's album as well, the refusal of the music to stabilise fully matching the portrayal of street dealing as a daily grind that nonetheless is always claustrophobically hemmed in with anxiety and paranoia. "Money on the Way" is actually one of the most open feeling tunes on Prenuptial Agreement, all showy widescreen synth stabs that add a sense of lofty grandeur to Stalin's semi-hoarse boasts of drug trade prowess ("my campaign to advertise cocaine" etc.), and a depressive chorus that makes "money on the way" sound fully as much a dire prophecy as it is a fervent wish.

If Stalin is less interesting here than elsewhere on the album, this slight shortfall is more than compensated by the almost innocent earnestness of the tune's acquisitiveness, grandiloquent but also melancholy in its seemingly misplaced optimism. The halcyon promise of the music - evoking the future as it was once imagined to be perhaps 20 years ago - is a fitting accompaniment, suggesting (to my mind at least) the fragility of a future prosperity that disappear at an moment. Forget Daft Punk, these guys would have done a great job scoring Tron Legacy.

^^^ holy shit

can someone post a zip when Tim's done? I always spend three months downloading every link, three months waiting to see if he'll post any more, and then a month later get around to taking the folder to work on a thumb drive to listen to.

i forgot abt that j stalin album too!

J Stalin album is far too long and almost anything with a male rnb chorus is a bit ropey, but there's still more than a normal album's worth of fantastic shit in there. Mostly it's the harder moments that do it for me, but Money On The Way is great but there are so many awesome tracks (Rock Day, D-Boy Blues, Don't Front, Self Made Millionaire all A++).

self made millionare has a sung male chorus tho? u don't bump birthday & red + blue lights? you're right that it seems too long tho, i almost never play this record all the way thru.

Yeah Self Made Millionaire is an exception, it's songs like Last Night and Get Off Me that I end up skipping.

u don't bump birthday & red + blue lights

Yeah these are both great.

This is the facebook group if you want links:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_168312249874081¬if_t=group_r2j

There's been much less talk about New Amerykah Part Two, but for me this explicitly soft, svelte, generous sounding album (well, in relative terms) is much more to my taste

cosign 100% -- "gone baby, don't be long" is one of the most beautiful things of the year

^^ YES

This is the facebook group if you want links:

yeah, but you have to have facebook to look at it

"out my mind, just in time" might be erykah's masterpiece

"desiccated" is kind of the last word i'd ever use re: part one though - it's so rich-sounding!

"rigorous consequentiality" - it only has this if you want it to. and why's it a bad thing anyway?

It's not a bad thing, I just don't like it as much personally. Different strokes. But something like "Hip Hop" just doesn't really appeal to me.

i guess you could say that it's just a mood thing -- 'rigorous conseqnetiality' vs the sensuality of part 2... but there's just something about part 2 that always appeals to me more

i don't want to say that it's "warmth" because i think part 1 has that too, but maybe it's more comforting? that sounds kinda twee tho

idk, it's "prettier"

i'm sort of fishing

yeah I'm happy to sub "comforting" and "pretty". I'm a superficial kinda listener in this regard (and most regards).

hah we had a big argument about this on the badu thread right? about how the 1st one is more critic friendly & what the differences between the two were

is that what happened?

i just remember getting pissed for some reason

all i know is that i identify with part 1 pretty much more than any other album i've ever heard. i feel like it's an album about me.

how do you argue against tho

i feel like you should recuse yourself

part 2 is lovely obv

the left brain/right brain characterisation of pt1/pt2 makes sense to a degree (and i know erykah peddled that line too) but i feel the separation between them is being way overstated - it's a bit reductive to imply that pt1 is the one about being Meaningful and Critic-Friendly and Consequential, and pt2 is the one about Soul and Warmth and Feeling - on both sides i think there's a degree to which those signifiers are being used as a priori reasons to prefer one or the other. but the music on both interweaves both sides really skilfully. if there's a reason for my preferring pt1 - and it's not by much, it's being no 1 of the year as opposed to top 5 of the year - it's because more of the songs are tighter, not because it's political or whatever.

I can only go on the fact that I returned to Pt 2 much more readily and try to extrapolate from there.

pt 2 is objectively better.

/obv troll

Wait, did you actually get some sleep?

well, i havent posted in like 7 hrs, so

obv not

anyway i prefer pt 2 also although i remember being surprised tim didnt talk much about 'honey' when that was a single ... it seemed like a great midpt between approaches

"Honey" is def. my favourite tune on pt 1.

post on ilx, eat, sleep, repeat

i like both new amerykah records relatively well (both in top 5-10 area for their given years). part 2's an easier listen, and i've thrown it on more readily. part 1 feels like a "challenging" sorta record that i dont wanna put on too often, but is then immensely rewarding when i do so (see also: the cure - prnogrphy, scott walker - the drift, there are lots of examples...)

i think 'that hump' is my fav off pt. 1

top to bottom

solder
the healer
that hump
me
after that, it's all kinda equal to me

i love "honey" but doesn't feel right to rank it against the other tunes here

soldier* obv.

ok theres a thread for this

^^ banging post imo

anyway, looking fwd to more of tim's favorites!

for those of you who loved the j stalin, ive come around to thinking that 'gas nation' might be the more consistent record ... so many incredible beats. its got less of a dark glossy 80s feel, a bit more of an open record on the whole, more diverse

it also has 'try again tomorrow' which is like alternate-universe popism smash

ok theres a thread for this

that whole sub-genre of post-Dilla scleroto-rap (and by extension scleroto-soul), whose aesthetic valorisation of queasiness is largely lost on my cloth ears.

aww

(i have no idea what you mean but "scleroto-rap" though?)

GIVE ME YAHZARAH OR GIVE ME DEATH TIM

just kidding, it'd be awesome if you love her song as much as I do but I love your selections and the blurbs so far.

"why dontcha call me no more" is still my #1 jam this year. i'm with you here, moka.

Lee Foss - U Got Me

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

This year it felt a bit like the nu-disco moment finally passed into its autumnal phase, symbolised (and certainly assisted) by Aeroplane's catastrophically misguided album, and more generally a certain sense that everything this style can do now has been done, and exhaustively. I'm not ready for this shift though. My favourite moment dancing this year was to a Classixx DJ set a few months ago, on the first hot day of spring, as the sun was setting. Classixx are hardly disproving the suspicion that the strip-mining of the nu-disco aesthetic is completed; it's more like they simultaneously summarise and popularise a perfected aesthetic, seizing on its most unashamedly joyous qualities and then juicing them up further, until the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding (which makes them sort of like the Moonbootica to Aeroplane's Get Physical).

I don't know if Classixx did or didn't play "U Got Me" that day, as I only discovered it about a month later, but it chimes in perfectly with Classixx's vibe of trapped-in-amber ecstatic lassitude: its round-bottomed R&B-disco strut and twinkling sparkle-melody imagining a world where no-one ever saw the point of moving beyond Evelyn King's "Love Come Down" (similarly, the highlight of the Classixx set was a still unknown to me edit of Madonna's "Lucky Star" that seemed to stretch on forever). Ironically,"U Got Me" samples Keith Sweat's "Twisted", which is nineties not eighties, but itself inhabited a pretty syncretic slow-jam soundworld - smoothness, the right kind of smoothness, never sounds out of time or place. As with Mark E's "R&B Drunkie" (whose sample source was similarly younger than it seemed) what "U Got Me" seems to admire in R&B is precisely its lack of concern about being revivalist or not being revivalist, which frees it up to achieve this kind of "the past is the present" endless summer vibe more easily than dance music per se.

This inherited lack of concern with timeliness ends up being a positive in my book, if only as a point of contrast: at a time of obsessive pointillist sound design and intricate vocal cut ups, it's refreshing and even charming to hear a tune so heavily invested in the densely smeared dazzle of French House: the yearning sampled vocals of "U Got Me" wrap around your ears like fairy floss, light as a feather but voluptuously thick as molasses. Moreover, the hint of R&B boogie in Foss' straight-jacketed slo-mo house groove provides such a useful short-cut to sexiness: whereas much otherwise very similar nu-disco can end up jetissonning sex in favour of pure loved up vibes, "U Got Me" treads the line perfectly, as happy to soundtrack a risque champagne-fuelled pool party as it a packed dancefloor in a field at sunset.

I'm into this ^

A+++++++++++++

and yeah classixx sense of like, revivalism should never be joyless & hidebound & generic & liberarianesque is exactly why they're so good. They handle music like pop DJs

also yeah 'love come down' is a really good exemplar of where this style is coming frmo!

last post then im headed out for real -- i need to do this 'holding back on my hottest secret jams till y-e' thing haha

Yeah it occurred to me this thread might look like that at times! It's more a case of me not tending to hang out much on rolling threads other than funky house sceptics...

that is dope imo

yes "u got me"! glad someone else loved it, it got tumbleweeds when i posted it on the house/techno thread (apart from some cunty vahid snark). love the b-side "happen for a reason" too - j-hud sample!

lee foss himself is pretty hott too

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ak20vFIRM5U/Sxeknr1PhoI/AAAAAAAAAHg/bbqZaRfKllA/s320/LeeFoss.jpg

Wish he IS hot...

the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding

This is a perfect way of putting it, some of my best 2010 dancefloor memories (or yacht deck memories, to ratchet up the cheese factor that little bit more) have come from exactly this feeling.

Been jamming that Lee Foss EP for a week solid. Enjoy these roundup threads Tim!

Naughty Raver - Tease Me (After Dark Mix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwsPtmMJtY4

"I love you so much... I'm feeling so hot... You got me goin'... You know ya hit the spot..." Like a lot of the classic early vocal (but only tenuously songful) 2-step garage, "Tease Me" seems rather ambivalent about its own desire, the diva's throaty declarations sounding pavlovian and probably drug-fuelled in their compulsive repetition - this quality was itself picked up from early house I expect, but if so then secretly and mostly unwittingly, a phenotype thrown forward several generations to emerge in a particularly attractive black sheep. The relationship between 2-step and UK funky is rather more straightforward, and I've grown used to stumbling across at least a couple of tunes each year that resurrect the former's capacity for jittery 3am amyl nitrate vibes, tracks whose sexiness and darkness aren't merely co-existent but actually interchangeable. In that regard this tune could easily sit next to Steve Gurley's remix of Lenny Fontana's "Spirit of the Sun" or DJ Klasse & Richie Boy's "Madness on the Streets", which is about as high praise as I can think of.

Naughty Raver's productions are almost always characterised by his gorgeously textured beats, which clutter and stretch out with a rolling fluency that's almost unparalleled, so naturalist that even though the drums here almost entirely follow a two-bar loop I slip into thinking they're playing in real time, alternating between fluttery bongo patterns and hard-hitting snares filled with marvelous fractional hesitations, as if the rhythm itself is suddenly profoundly uncertain about its own amorous adventures (see also, if you can find them, his rather harder percussive work-outs "Drama" and "Sticks & Stones", for the same vibe flipped from druggy-lust to panic and mania respectively). Naughty Raver's drums capture so much of what I love about funky's approach to rhythm, the way they walk this tightrope between organic fluidity and total alienness, beyond which they can achieve a sort of tumbling inevitability, the beats always pulling you forward into themselves with a logic of its own, as if the producer himself couldn't interrupt the groove if he wanted to.

On the After Dark mix of "Tease Me" (his sexiest tune, and certainly his most successful vocal tune by some distance), he adds an unsettling xylobass riff that's warped to sound as if the tune's heaviness has already busted your speakers. The first time I heard it I actually wondered if something was wrong with my copy. This general trick, which is so cosmically boring (by virtue of over-iteration) in drum & bass or dubstep now, magically regains its effectiveness in such a sexually charged setting, the seduction of "Tease Me" creating a context in which breaking the machine is once again an enticing concept. Rather than simply build on a monolithic insistence on punishing hardness, it becomes another weave in the tune's so-wrong-it's-right lust-overdrive, the sonic heavy petting turning claustrophobic, sucking the air out of your lungs.

Hot Toddy - Won't Let Go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkW1W9yDGq8

In retrospect the thing I loved most about electro-house (perhaps more properly electro-disco) circa 2004 was how widescreen and expensive sounding so much of it was: relatively simple, unhurried grooves using all the tricks available to them to seemingly encompass the entire world within their simple reiterations - less tunes to get lost in than to hide in, taking comfort in the overwhelming purity and monomania of their high-gloss logic. I guess I'm a sucker for that vein of blown glass perfectionism, tunes that for a short while give your live a sense of narrative arc by virtue of their delicately spiraling structures of build and release.

Those days are gone, but Hot Toddy (who it seems has been brilliant forever, or at the very least since 2004's "Mind Trip" which is when I belatedly discovered the dude) carries forward something of that sound in his various tributes to disco, deep house (see last year's beautiful "I Need Love"), balearic and boogie - the latter receiving particular if hardly surprising emphasis on his 2010 album Late Night Boogie. This stuff sounds huge and expensive and arguably not much else, though the snapping beats and obese bottom-end bass certainly help to prevent the album from sounding like a mere distillation of Metro Area-derived mid-00s material - not to mention, am I wrong to suggest, a certain relaxed hands-in-the-air joie de vivre, the syncopated drums in particular dispelling that slightly fussed-over vibe that even gorgeous disco-revivalism can sometimes exhibit. In this regard check the groaning funk of "Freekend" and sighing rock-disco of "On the 1AM" especially: tracks whose almost careless seeming opening rhythms make their eventual skyscraper pinnacles seem even more remarkable.

I chose to single out "Won't Let Go" because ironically its relative subtlety makes it more approachable, at least in the sense of being more in line with other dance music of the past half decade or so, sly and sexy and smooth and slinky whereas in other places Hot Toddy comes on all bold and brash and brightly coloured. Here it translates into a smoother disco rhythm, languorous female vocals ("I'm like a predator around you"!!) and a gorgeously unfurling acid bassline that bubbles and percolates throughout with a slowly generating intensity that on the one hand is acid 101 and yet on the other, as is so often the case, still sounds better than any sound ever made by humans. It's so great to hear a real slow-burner like this again, a tune where every second of the seven minute groove seems to build so naturally and inevitably on the moment before it, with no switch-ups or surprises or sudden leftfield breakdowns, just a rising sense of intensity like a deep tissue massage on the dancefloor. For Hot Toddy, sudden surprises in themselves are somehow gauche, an admission of defeat even, like your original idea wasn't good enough to see it through. Which is not a universal truth by any means, but seven minutes isn't so long that he can't keep you convinced while "Won't Let Go" is playing.

Album cover is dope as well IMO:

http://i1.soundcloud.com/artworks-000002250166-p32jj5-crop.jpg?149483

that would look ridiculous if it didn't have a "smoky" haze over the design -- which i suppose fits the title, and actually makes it look incredible, tbh

Gayngs - Faded High

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

Gayngs got a bit of hype for being an indie group playing with R&B, which is one of those endorsements that can do more harm than good - it either makes one suspicious or sets in train expectations or standards of judgment that can't possibly be met (most obviously, indie vocals generally simply aren't in the same game as R&B let alone league). In most cases the link is really one of shared resonances - an interest in rhythm and atmospherics and softness and a very vague notion of "soulfulness" that white pop-rock has trucked with (albeit intermittently) for ages anyway. It helps to remember that the rock music that R&B singers and producers seem to love most is Phil Collins and Coldplay.

Gayngs don't sound an awful lot like Phil or Coldplay either, though the distance isn't massive. If I had to construct a lineage I'd point to 10CC's "I'm Not In Love", some Peter Gabriel and (especially) Roxy Music's Avalon, through to more recent stuff like Junior Boys at their least energetic and (especially) A Mountain Of One - gauzy, genteel mood music whose interest in non-rock musics is partly a desire to fill the vacuum that emerges when you realise that you don't, in fact, want to rock. The first A Mountain Of One EP in particular points the way, with its mixture of atmospheric pop balladry and balearic mist and ringing guitar work. That band soon veered off into an obsession with the least successful of their (initially) numerous stylistic affectations, over-produced patchouli scented noodle-rock. Gayngs have maintained the balance of the first AMO1 release by trying to keep all of its divergent impulses on foot at all times, each track offering some configuration of forlorn synthesiser padding, dolorous but warm basslines, lonely guitar solos, ghostly multitracked vocals and usually a descent at some point into claustrophobic loops seemingly derived from another tune entirely.

Many people have heard "The Gaudy Side of Town"; along with "Crystal Rope", "Faded High" is my other favourite and also much less typical of the band's sound, not least for the dominance of female vocals (though not, I must stress, with any relationship to R&B). "Faded High" is less a song than a series of ideas held together by the song's relatively driving beat and shimmering synth chords, which make it the album's most upbeat song. One of the things I like about Gayngs is how their vocals seem to emerge from and sink back into the music easily: on this song you can hear random snatches ("I keep my heart in a jar", "you're breaking every rule I make", "you say you'll keep your cash, your fingers crushing mine, your gorgeous touch", "I want your body on...") but then they subside into chromatic colour, another synth line - at one point early on, perhaps my favourite of the entire album, the vocals actually transform into an aching little synth hook that's never repeated.

"So far so indie" you might say dismissively, but I think what distinguishes Gayngs somewhat is that everything here, even the (somewhat) noisy sections, sounds so thought out and landscaped - gauzy and even fogged over it might be, but this very soft haziness has been sculpted so lovingly, reminding me of The Blue Nile's Hats or even the second disc of Kate Bush's Aerial (though, to be fair, it's not a patch on either of those albums - how could it be?). Like a lot of the artists I've mentioned, its overstuffed voluptuousness will be off-putting to some, but I felt like this year I didn't hear as much indulgent music as I've become used to, and Gayngs went a long way toward correcting the balance.

Mr Mageeka - Different Lekstrix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrAG8faeC7o

I first heard "Different Lekstrix" in an eventually legendary Marcus Nasty set from November 2008. I believe that this set also was the first place in which I heard Devine Collective's "House Girls 1" and Lil' Silva's "Tribal Land", and is as close to a Rosetta Stone for the next two years of hard, MC-ready funky as you'll find. I didn't actually ID the tune until some time after that, probably not long before I wrote a review on my blog in the second half of last year. Back then the producer was called Mos' Wanted; this year the tune finally got a release under the moniker of Mr Mageeka, which sounds too interchangeable with Doc Daneeka for my liking, but whatever.

It's still that November 2008 set that finds "Different Lekstrix" in its most winning context: simply put, this is a tune designed for MCs, to delight them with its unpredictable clicks and whirs and slithery bleeps, to provide a spongy and flexible structure in which they can play with rhymes and counter rhythms of their own. It loses something as an instrumental tune, but only enough to downgrade it from life-changing to excellent, and I imagine that even if you hear it here for the first time you will be able to discern the ghost of vocal patterns etched into the groove like game trails. Like a lot of funky tunes designed for MCs (which is basically all instrumental funky) you don't really need more than about 3 minutes of it, but those first 3 minutes are marvelous, a constantly warping and mutating assemblage of pings, pops and panicking computers in a groove that feels like it's made of wire mesh, full of holes yet tightly woven.

In terms of sonic forebears it's hard not to hear LFO's Frequencies in the tune's slightly sickly bass riffs, but rhythmically "Different Lekstrix" is its own beast. If its release on the Numbers label implies that it might be on some kind of post-dubsep crossover ish (and certainly it's gotten some attention in those quarters) the groove stakes out a different territory, its patchwork construction built from the constant of a 4X4 kick and then an ever-changing riot of what I'm tempted to call percussive punctuation: skittering snares, shuffling hi-hats and alien-sounding claps which arrange themselves around the kick with a subtle grace that is both "house" and yet utterly distinctive sounding. As always with funky, the trick here is how odd-sounding you can make the house groove sounding without actually breaking the link. If you haven't got inside the music's logic it's possible that you simply won't hear the groove here as anything special; once the logic clicks, it's like a beautiful accent that you can't get enough of, the openness and oddness of it making you want to find a complementary response, be it vocally or physically. The jokey youtube video clip above actually gets this collaborative quality of the track perfectly: it's what you do with "Different Lekstrix" that makes it so compulsive.

I have trouble thinking of Different Lekstrix as straight funky because it's so much more textured than a lot of it, and I've heard it popping up in weird places this year - in Ivan Smagghe and Ramanman sets for one thing and certainly in other techier contexts as well.

Mr Magieka is a wizard from 1980s British children's books, fwiw:

http://www.puffin.co.uk/static/images/mr_majeika_circus.jpg

incredibbblle! i love that!!!

Storm Queen - Look Right Through

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAKq5wlMhGs

It seems like there's usually at least one great storming male diva house throwback tune each year - last year, of course, was Azari & III's "Reckless With Your Love", which not only was excellent as a house tune but also was to my mind is one of the great diva-house songs, and a song that simply wouldn't make sense delivered in any other style or manner. Like a lot of music that hits me thematically as well as viscerally it's the kind of thing that makes me wish I made music. But then diva vocal house has that effect quite often, the short-circuit between surface dazzle and hidden depths so irresistible that even people who stumble on seeming superficiality elsewhere intuitively understand its logic - it's the kind of music, in short, that brings out the best in its listeners fully as much as its makers.

"Look Right Through" (produced by Morgan Geist) isn't quite as fine a song as "Reckless With Your Love", but that's an unfair comparison: "Look Right Through" is lesser only in that it seems content to be a charming, impassioned, exhortative diva anthem about unrequited desire, carefree in its classicism - though formally, of course, it's heartbroken, resentful, oddly philosophical. But these traits emerge in classicist male diva house like hereditary features, inevitable and right-seeming as your right arm. Of course who's to say that there isn't a similarly moving deeper story lurking underneath: as far as I can tell the singer shifts from a drug addict or drunkard lover to a series of one night stands to a realisation that everyone in the world takes him for granted. Shit gets pretty real in this song.

Still, in some ways "Look Right Through" is more track than song: so much of the delight of this tune inheres in its ceaseless mutation, moving restlessly from rudimentary house percussion to shimmering, shivering synth chords and noodly arpeggios and bumping bass, before a bleepy breakdown that in no way preprares you for the tune's sudden headlong plunge into booming, bottom of a well bass at the four minute mark, as the diva wails "am I a piece of glass in your mind??" From there the tune almost disintegrates into murky dub-house, before those nervous synth-chords suddenly emerge, flittering above your ears as delicately as ever. It's great dancefloor trickery, and in the club "Look Right Through" provokes ever greater displays of enthusiasm from dancers with each shifting articulation. I think part of it is sheer surprise: "Look Right Through" is so musically and performatively generous in a style that hardly requires it, you could churn out endless derivations of "Love Won't Turn Around" and everyone would lap it up, but instead Geist and his diva Damon Scott shower you with hooks and ideas like it's the last chance they'll ever get.

the tune's sudden headlong plunge into booming, bottom of a well bass at the four minute mark

one of the moments of the year 4 real

i'm surprised to see "different lekstrix" here though, i like it and the way it decorates sets, but i'd never think to highlight it particularly.

storm queen is definitely one of my tunes of the year.

mine as well, great write up Tim

On the After Dark mix of "Tease Me" (his sexiest tune, and certainly his most successful vocal tune by some distance)

man i am quite happy to let you take your destined place at the head of the queue for any tune titled "tease me (after dark mix)" but let's not throw the baby out with the sexy bathwater - 'show me' is at least on a par (i prefer it personally) and if i was to really nitpick then even his andriah and hannah liston mixes could hardly be said to have been even vaguely unsuccessful at what they were trying to achieve.

none of which is to say 'tease me' isn't brilliant, of course. although i do still think something's wrong with my copy :/

the way it decorates sets

bait not to be risen to btw

In retrospect my Mr Mageeka blurb looks like I'm spending a lot of time staking a priority claim. My point was more how songs can change their meaning and context, going from "awesome track that the MCs lit up in a radio set" to refined-circles-crossover-tune with the likes of Ivan Smagghe (which makes sense) - and how this can be especially dramatic when the tune is only released at the end of this process because it's the final incarnation that gets codified by and large.

I agree with lex to an extent (though I'm not sure whether/how dismissive you intend "decorates" to mean, lex?) w/r/t the tune making more sense in the mix, though I think it makes even more sense with MCs, and that was really the point I was trying to make, that this tune which can function very differently in different contexts and with different connotations still seems to function most effectively in the first "incarnation" that I was aware of.

Also I obv can't make a radio set from November 2008 a track of 2010 even if it deserves celebrating every year.

I'm hoping that one of the side benefits of this process (which is restricted to tracks available as proper standalone releases) is that it will demonstrate how much funky actually was released this year.

Ramadanman in 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utvgs27fT4U

In the second half of the year I felt haunted by Addison Groove's "Footcrab", which seemed to follow me to every bar and club: a bloodless attempt at dubstep/juke fusion which is dislikable less for being actively bad than for the chasm-like disjuncture between its rep and its actual quality. Ramadanman's "Work Them" was effectively the same track, or at least the same idea: a post-dubstep tune riding thin, densely programmed 808 beats, looped duo-syllabic vocals and a sudden and incongruous swerve into moody synth chords (a shit just got real moment so that you know you're listening to serious music). How come I like "Work Them" so much then? Probably the answer is that Ramadanman is just flat out better at this whole thing of setting up a rendezvous with another genre.

He certainly has form: "Blimey" from 2008 was probably the best attempt (of many) to evoke the headwrecking rhythmic splendour of mid-90s jungle within a dubstep context; last year's "Wad" (under the Pearson Sound moniker) remains far and way the best conscious stab at UK funky by an outsider, while "Justify" (with Appleblim) was a marvelous piece of syncopated deep tech-house. The results are sometimes just "good" rather than mindblowing: about the only reason to get enthusiastic about the "Work Them"-like "Glut" is that it's much better than "Footcrab"; "Don't Change For Me", which sounds like a slowed down version of the Foul Play remix of Omni Trio's "Mystic Stepper", is more admirable for its attempt to recapture jungle's ecstatic early days than it is actually adorable; "Bass Drums" is actively boring. But Ramadanman's hit rate remains surprisingly high for such a risky approach, I suspect because he's interested in rhythm first and foremost: one gets the sense with all his best moments that the very first thing he worked out was what implications the desired fusion would have for the groove, and while his tunes aren't always entirely spare, I suspect the best of them could be stripped down to just the drums and would remain pretty enthralling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREkHjH0sVk

With some exceptions, both dubstep and its satellite "post-dubstep" zones have tended to de-emphasise setting up a rolling groove and focus more on how both to stage it and interrupt it: big "drops" in mainstream dubstep; sudden switch-ups, cut-ups, collisions and overwhelmingly detailed high-end sound design for the rest. On "Work Them" and its even sparer, more jittery and compulsive cousins "Grab Somebody" and "Mir", the interest in 808s has little to do with such techniques or even a "hey guys!" nod to juke and similar genres; instead, it's all about the opportunities these sonics afford for scintillating, meticulously crafted groves the roll, snap and shudder with a hypnotic intensity that's endlessly listenable. Ramadanman doesn't shy away from high-end sound design either, but he tends to relegate it to the role of sympathetic supporting star - on his gorgeous remix of Jamie Woon's "Night Air" he basically adds nothing to the original except a delectable syncopated house rhythm and a now warm, now ominous bassline. The groove is the thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jW6GnseoE&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XovlxaHBD0Y

His remix of Spark's "Revolving" is maybe the track from this year that is most representative of all these different qualities, its phasing vocal loops and alternately booming and whirring beats making for perhaps his most lush attempt in this new post-juke vein, a more expansive version of the recent "Blanked"/"Blue Eyes" single as Pearson Sound. The melodies he uses here - part stereospanning vocal samples, part quasi-trancey synth arpeggios and sweeping strings - are unabashedly pretty, almost straightforward; the vocals are cut-up a little, but more in the manner of standard mid-90s house than the post-Todd Edwards slice and dice grandiosity to which we've become accustomed from just about everyone. All of which makes the sudden plummets into mindboggling beat work - beats that seem to change and mutate constantly, ceaselessly, but also imperceptibly, throughout the entire track - all the more effective. Such is the rigorous intensity of Ramadanman's grooves that he can afford to dispense with the fear of the obvious that would plague so many others in his position.

love "work them" but you didn't mention my favourite ramadanman trax of 2010 - "grab somebody" and most of all "your words matter" with midland (and indeed its a-side "more than you know" - SO pretty. tim i think the prettiness you require in r&b, i require in club music (unless it's some machinic audion ish, obv)

ramadanman & midland - your words matter

that spark remix is pretty amazing though

(i fear the original, she sounds like yet another fucking british quirkstress)

I did mention "Grab Somebody", albeit briefly. It and "Mir" and "Work Dem" are all favourites of mine in that minimal 808 style but I couldn't talk about all of them in detail. Yeah I'm actually afraid to check the Spark original!

I think the "Your Words Matter" release is like the one Ramadanman record from this year I haven't tracked down yet.

oh yeah i did clock the "grab somebody" mention, i was referring to "your words matter" then added "grab somebody" to the sentence and um didn't edit

You're right though in the sense that it deserves more singling out. But I felt like the above post would like a bit overboard Ramadanman fanboy already.

tim i think the prettiness you require in r&b, i require in club music (unless it's some machinic audion ish, obv)

I should temper this statement perhaps: with particular R&B performers it's more like the pretty tracks are the gateway for me to enjoy the rest, it's what I hone in on first.

Which might be the same for you vis a vis club music?

The Cast of Glee - Teenage Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E46BhMIRujI

In my world of young people, songs on Glee sit somewhere between a bootleg (in the 2001 sense) and an official remix in terms of legitimacy as songs, which means if they're good and/or popular enough they can overtake the original as a definitive version. What makes a Glee cover version good and popular? I can hold forth on the former and speculate on the latter, but the truth is that I'm often confounded by which ones catch on.

Solo songs are easiest to parse, with the castmember mostly echoing the original performer and standing and falling on how good a job they muster (my favourite effort remaining the fierce version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows" from one of the earliest episodes). Meanwhile, Glee usually manages good group numbers with songs that radiate what you might call "staged sincerity", because that's exactly the vibe the Glee group are good at giving off themselves by and large. So, while it could never replace the original in my heart, their "Don't Stop Believing" chooses its source material well, perceiving in the idiosyncratic anthem the capacity to become more glassy and architectural (more, in essence, like "We Built This City (On Rock 'n' Roll)") while losing little of its lustre (I have a nascent theory brewing that the mid-to-late eighties was the golden age of staged sincerity that is worth expanding elsewhere).

Far less successful are the too-frequent mash-ups, which reduce everything to a single-entendre by foregrounding the staged spectacle and evacuating the sincerity. In cases of songs with some level of heart, the results can be distressing - combining "Umbrella" with "Singing In The Rain" does active violence to the complex emotional poise of the former song, while drowning the cheer of the latter in theatrics. This is Glee celebrating spectacle for its own sake, but spectacle without the desire to communicate something other than itself is empty, and comes off as self-impressed more than anything else.

"Teenage Dream" falls into the first category of staged sincerity, though it's slightly more complex than that. For one, Katy Perry effectively already is a Glee character who simply happens to exist in real life (though her dodgy singing voice might have prevented her landing such a position), and it's hard to imagine "Teenage Dream" becoming more staged-sincere than its original already is. This is both the charm and for some listeners the shortfall of Katy's version: its slamming, percussive choruses, its sledgehammer-pop sonics, its slightly bittersweet harmonised bridges, all add up to a pop song so monolithic that you'll love it if you love the idea of monolithic pop on principle, and find it wanting if you want pop that sounds remotely like it's by, about and for real people.

The Glee version reintroduces humanity, you could say, though not in the ways you might expect. This all-male version recasts the song as ostensibly smug, smarmy (homoerotic) flirtation in the "I know you want me" vein, a confident peacock strut of vocal dynamics and OTT gestures and moments of deliberate, almost heavyhanded coyness. Beneath this (and you don't have to watch the show to figure this out - in fact I haven't even seen this episode), it's a gesture of friendship based on the ridiculousness of everything it ostensibly is, its peacockiness a kind of inverted truthtelling. And beyond that, in the fingersnapping pop of its rhythm, the sighing sweetness of its harmonies, the "why hasn't anyone done that?" trick of vocally mimicking an EQ filter sweep, it's a celebration of pop's armoury of such tactics, and the way that these have a meaning, a resonance independent from their verisimilitude to reality. "Teenage Dream" is the right choice of song to cover because, like Jessica Simpson's "I Think I'm In Love With You" before it, works as a generic pop song about such tactics. In that regard it doesn't matter whether the flirtation is true or false, what matters is how well it's sold, and good salesmanship is itself a kind of generosity. While spectacle for its own sake is empty, spectacle as a means of reaching out, of crossing a space by means of shared language, can feel like the opposite. Less about staged sincerity, then, and more about the sincerity of the stage.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO >>>>>>>>>>>>>:(

(my favourite effort remaining the fierce version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows" from one of the earliest episodes)

nononononoNONONONONONONONONONONONO TIM HOW CAN YOU

glee is definitely one of my least favourite things ever, fuck glee fuck it forever

maura on glee otm: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2010/12/the_20_worst_so_17.php

Yes but the "Loser" cover really was awful (as were all of the funk episode performances). By no means am I saying Glee is an umambiguous force for good.

i'm saying it's an unambiguous force for BAD - every single thing i've heard from it has been completely dreadful, and it never ever seems to end

that cover of "bust your windows" is just so hollow, so light-entertainment

Happy Christmas Lex,
Love from the cast of Glee.

concur that glee is vile - posting this song might just have been actually unforgiveable had tim not pulled out his best blurb in ages for it. props!

haha oh my god that video is disgusting though.

Undisputed - Terror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=iv&v=UMtjUolsB3M&annotation_id=annotation_48856

A few years back, trying to get at what it was that changed about drum & bass almost irrevocably in about 1997, I started to talk about "rhythmic danger", which is a pompous phrase for something that I wish I could pin down better. The idea is relatively simple: jungle's syncopated beats that really gripped you, that commanded your limbs and confounded your senses, weren't merely the most complex or the most dense or the most chopped-up; a relatively simple beat or spacious beat could do the same amount of damage, because the real issue is the extent to which the groove plays with your expectations, and a slight deviation on a straightforward idea can do that fully as well an overtly complex idea (it should go without saying therefore that what changed in d&b at this point was that grooves began to adhere ever more closely to people's expectations rather than play with them).

UK funky, with its variously extensive and short journeys away from the house groove, gets this better than I would have imagined possible back then, because if you could define UK funky rhythmically it would have to be as the genre-wide application of this idea to house beats. Unlike 2-step, it has no separate or distinct rhythmic matrix which people can positively identify (and then relax, safe and comfortable with that identification) - funky becomes more thoroughly and effectively itself the more it dodges your expectations and sneaks past them. Undisputed get it particularly well perhaps because they're so happy to be craftsmen rather than artists. "Terror" is in the exact same mould as the previous "hit", 2009's "Sunglasses": a stomping 4X4 kickdrum, staggering metallic synth riffs that provide the main counter-rhythm, a disappointingly generic vocal sample, and the exact same clattering bongo loop in the background. Really, "Terror" is more in the way of a remix, its only real purpose as a standalone track being to explore a slightly different kind of groove.

"Terror" is in fact more straight-footed than "Sunglasses", the synth riff mostly mirroring the 4X4 kicks but for a little spurt of energy at the end of each bar. Counter-intuitively, the beat sounds even more off-centre and perverse than "Sunglasses", and none more so than when the bongo loops fall away and all you're left with is a 4X4 kick, mirroring synths, and that slight end of bar disruption. It's as if, the closer Undisputed get to the utter simplicity of a 4X4 groove, the more writ large and ominous is that capacity for deviation, the more inevitable and meaningful its arrival. Over five minutes the tune explores this idea in a series of only slightly deviating iterations. This ought to get boring, but I find Undisputed's grooves get more involving the more thoroughly you immerse yourself in their world of changing same. My favourite means of listening to this tune is in the context of a 25 minute mix of their own productions they put together for BBC 1xtra earlier this year, where the originals and (only marginally different) VIP mixes of "Terror" and "Sunglasses", together with a host of likeminded beats, are mixed together in a fabulously endless paean to the 4X4 beat and what breaks away from it.

(the above youtube link is actually for Part 1 of that BBC 1xtra mix. "Terror" starts at about 3:20, and mixes straight into the attendant VIP mix at about 4:30)

In my world of young people, songs on Glee sit somewhere between

A+

I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where, uh, Phil Collins' presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Christy, take off your robe. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. Sabrina, remove your dress. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism. Sabrina, why don't you, uh, dance a little. Take the lyrics to Land of Confusion. In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as, uh, anything I've heard in rock. Christy, get down on your knees so Sabrina can see your ass. Phil Collins' solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like In the Air Tonight and, uh, Against All Odds. Sabrina, don't just stare at it, eat it. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is Sussudio, a great, great song, a personal favorite.

first time on ilm huh

think the interesting thing is that i guess you could say the 'sunglasses'/'terror' line (along with mad one's 'house girls' series) is the very rare example of a kind of successful dubby versioning in funky - the undisputed tracks this year have drawn their anthemic value not only directly from their own slamming efficacy but also diffusely, descending on sets like some sinister fog, through the cumulative myriad minor alterations of and musings on by other producers in the scene.

most notably the dumplin, champion and andy jay & s-tee 'sunglasses' remixes, or (my personal fave) the greyman mix of 'terror'.

Yeah this is spot on, though the rarity of it is the flipside of how awful this tendency probably would become if it was a widespread thing.

i've been playing the storm queen track over-and-over the past few days. thanks for pointing it out, tim.

usually long dance tracks wear out their welcome with me (since i'm listening on headphones, not while dancing). but this track does what the best dance songs do for me; constantly evolving, adding elements one moment, dropping out elements the next moment. one good example -- that change-of-pace at the 4:00 mark -- is, like lex said above, thrilling.

Lurker reporting, just wanted to say that this has been very interesting read even if some of this stuff is way too advanced for me (Ramadanmanetc, Glee) keep them coming.

Oh and the Lee Foss is sensational!

Lloyd - Lay It Down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSkRBCPRf8Q

When people talk about Trey Songz having little to no personality I've always thought to myself that the accusation makes more sense to me if applied to Lloyd. It's not that I dislike Lloyd and it's not that he's anonymous - in fact it's the opposite on both counts. Lloyd's pinched, nasal vocals are instantly recognisable, giving most of his material a kind of yearning quality or, alternately, a lightness of touch that is in each case distinct from all the other male R&B singers of the day. If you could draw a line in the sand with all of them on the one side (R Kelly, Usher, Chris Brown, The-Dream, even Trey and Jeremih, even Jason fucking Derulo) and Lloyd on the other, the division would be in Lloyd's seeming inability ever to sound weighty.

A drawback if you're looking for weightiness - the actual spite or leering hunger or genuine pain that any of those others can pull off or at least nobly attempt on occasion - and to be honest over an entire album I'd want at least a little bit (which is why "Blind" and "Unfortunate" are the secret key track on the new Trey Songz album). In small doses though Lloyd's music can give off the kind of laughing gas buzz that his own voice sounds augmented by - needless to say gaseous and insubstantial, this music doesn't want to tie itself to your heartstrings only because it never ever wants to be tied down. Of course Lloyd has done romantic songs and paranoid songs and lusty songs and cocky songs, but in each case the attraction comes less from the actual transmission of the tune's nominal vibe and more from the formal loveliness of the facsimile, like stained glass windows depicting events you vaguely register as having once been considered important.

All of which is true except and until the case of "Lay It Down", which renders my above paragraph, if not incorrect, then subject to a substantial caveat. Trampling and even boorish where so much of Lloyd's music is as smooth and assured as good hired help, "Lay It Down" is like a secret successor to Chris Brown's "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" - juvenile but kind-hearted (if you can remember ever thinking of Brown that way), simultaneously clumsy and cute in its puppy-like fumblings. Lloyd sings in a kind of top-of-his-lungs screech (if Lloyd has lungs? Top of his throat at any rate) over a reassuring arrangement that is unusually organic and conservative for him - as if to further prevent his habit of merging with the typically airy, amorphous backing music - and shouting "lay your head on my pillow!" with an insistent enthusiasm that by rights ought to destroy forever any chances of successful seduction - which of course is precisely its charm.

Male R&B often can feel preternaturally mature, albeit on a line of "maturity" that runs from consummate to chauvinist, the only constant being the performer's aura of having worked out how to cater to your every need, or at least each of your needs that he considers worth caring about. What I've wanted more of is precisely that overgrown pup vibe that characterised "Yo", yes, but also "Shawty Is Da Shit" and a good half of the first Jeremih album. It's not that this stuff is entirely absent; more that I think R&B has the capacity to provide such a marvelous evocation of young love, its awe and its awkwardness, that it seems a shame there isn't more of a cottage industry of this stuff.

I'm not sure whether Lloyd can actually transform himself into a performer in this area - could he muster a "With You" or a "My Sunshine"? Could he manage that complexion of innocence? - and with several albums under his belt maybe it's too late to start trying. Maybe it's safest to stick with his patented product line of helium seduction. But if so "Lay It Down" will remain a great one-off, and never more so than when Lloyd launches into quasi-yodelling, "Oh lay oh lay oh lay", as if the more bold, the more ridiculous, the more humiliating his daring, the more inevitably and hard you will fall for him. Will this strategy succeed or fail? Don't tell him. It's more endearing if he doesn't know either way.

Jason fucking Derulo

love how when TIm finally takes out the "*" from "F*cking" or "F***ing" it's in a damn worthy context

Would like to say that's the plan but in truth it has more to do with whether I'm posting from work.

Anyway truth is that Derulo's "What If" is a tune, though not enough to erase the memory of "Watcha Say" or "Ridin' Solo".

Lloyd's pinched, nasal vocals are instantly recognisable, giving most of his material a kind of yearning quality or, alternately, a lightness of touch that is in each case distinct from all the other male R&B singers of the day...the division would be in Lloyd's seeming inability ever to sound weighty.

lloyd = the male cassie, innit. and that's why i have tendencies to #lloydfanclub at times. though i never managed to get into "lay it down"! it's certainly got nothing on the young goldie ep.

i still can't even comprehend how the glee performance of "teenage dream" was shoehorned into a television episode

that said, i love the original song & that performance -- i think it's funny & perverse to think of an outside source having to make a KP song this: "ostensibly smug, smarmy (homoerotic) flirtation in the 'I know you want me' vein"

i'm not even #cassiefanclub & even i'm clutching my pearls at the idea of lloyd's prissy voice being able to convey in its softness even half of what cassie can muster just by stepping into the booth

personally i think "lay it down" has a great beat but is pretty underwritten as a song & man lloyd's whole "air being let out of a balloon" thing is OTT in a way that makes me wince

it was more evident on his older stuff - you/get it shawty/girls around the world/young goldie

sounding very some dude right now bro xp

i realize at the outset the possible hypocrisy of criticizing "lay it down" for being underwritten while going on to praise robin thicke's "sex therapy" -- which of course interpolates "it's my party" for it's hook -- but i really do think that "sex therapy" is a much better version of "lay it down" -- you get the same effect from the drums, but i think that "sex therapy" is more... sufficiently languid -- the whole song feels like a release to me, from production (massage parlor synths, twinkling keys, guitar squiggles) from vocals (thicke is a much better high voiced vocalist, obv) where there's something very pinched & stuffy to me about "lay it down"

sounding very some dude right now bro xp

― lyrics is weak ... like clock radio similes (deej), Sunday, December 26, 2010 3:53 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

you should've waited for me to post about the drums first

i also take offense to the idea that "lay it down" is as good as the lovebird stuff from chris brown's early career!! esp "yo (excuse me miss)" which is like top 20 single of the whole decade

I think R&B has the capacity to provide such a marvelous evocation of young love, its awe and its awkwardness, that it seems a shame there isn't more of a cottage industry of this stuff.

this is otm & let us all mourn the death of vistoso bosses as well as the fact that "delerious" wasn't a huge hit

wtf is ramadanman 15 years old?

this is otm & let us all mourn the death of vistoso bosses as well as the fact that "delerious" wasn't a huge hit

did yall hear kourtney heart's "my boy" this year or

i only repped for it tirelessly

i did, it's good but "delirious" is >>>>>>>>>>>

ramadanman's in his 20s. his real name's dave btw.

yeah "delirious" is >>>>>>>>>>> but "my boy" made my p&j ballot this year too!

that's a young looking dude -- "work them" is kind of the fucking shit, jesus

i found a new metric of quality in 2010 that's based on how long it takes me, if at all, to close out a youtube to download a HQ mp3

hahahaha yes

FTR "Lay It Down" isn't as good as "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" but then Chris 2010 isn't Chris 2005 so what am I gonna do.

In general I'd be hesitant to say that he's the male Cassie precisely because I have doubts about his range emotionally, my favourite Cassie tunes are either colder or warmer than anything I've heard Lloyd do.

OTOH the context in which Lex uses it above strikes me as spot on, particularly in terms of parlaying limited vocals into a strength.

why people gotta hate on 'riding solo' all the time, do you all not like the idea of an alternate universe where lil boosie is an r&b star or something.

agree with jordan for the most part re 'lay it down' (up until he brings 'sex therapy' into it, idk what that's all about) although that underwritten quality works quite well on the radio where it basically turns into some drunken shanty. however where i have a choice in the matter i usually give my ears a rest and and turn it down so i can put on fabolous & lloyd's 'real playa like' from 2007 instead - you should all do the same, cos shit is real.

i realize at the outset the possible hypocrisy of criticizing "lay it down" for being underwritten while going on to praise robin thicke's "sex therapy" -- which of course interpolates "it's my party" for it's hook -- but i really do think that "sex therapy" is a much better version of "lay it down" -- you get the same effect from the drums, but i think that "sex therapy" is more... sufficiently languid -- the whole song feels like a release to me, from production (massage parlor synths, twinkling keys, guitar squiggles) from vocals (thicke is a much better high voiced vocalist, obv) where there's something very pinched & stuffy to me about "lay it down"

― BIG SANTA aka the sleighdriver (J0rdan S.), Sunday, December 26, 2010 4:56 AM (11 hours ago)

good post

do not really get the "underwritten" point though - are you talking about the hook? or the verses? chorus is pretty irresistable and i really love the energy of the verses ("tell your friends you ain't going out tonight / imma get that shimmy on and work that body right) - like i think tim says it's earnest in a sort-of-corny but still totally endearing way. he really rides the beat well too, especially when he picks it up in the second half of each verse. & if you do not f/w the yodeling at the end then you are totally fucking up imo

best part of the song is the end:

so i can work it, work it,
WORK IT, WORK IT
*yodels*

awesome post btw tim

*irresistible

yeesh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq--g4zIuNA

Erykah Badu's 'Gone Baby Don't Be Long' is my favorite song on the album, the one that actually has me feeling the astral funk thing she tries to promote, the other songs I've heard don't rub me the right way.

Might be the slap bass... I've got some sort of innate aversion to it.

why people gotta hate on 'riding solo' all the time, do you all not like the idea of an alternate universe where lil boosie is an r&b star or something.

I think I just prefer an alternate universe where "Bottom to the Top" is a hit, I don't know that I want that vibe transmuted into R&B - or rather, I don't think I want that if the outcome is "Ridin' Solo". Really though it's just the grain of Deroolo's voice and the repetition of the title that gets to me.

"In My Head" was decent. "What If" (at least with attendant video clip) kinda moves me, but I'm always a fuxx for chart R&B that could be played at a funeral.

i don't think i can cosign any positivity towards desrouleaux. it's like that taio cruz song that j0rdan likes, just because it's there and on the radio all the time doesn't mean it has to be called a good pop song.

it's a good tune in search of a bearable singer

Chris Sorbello - So Lonely (Hook & Sling Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJo434FTxM

The rise of the Guetta-style R&B/dance crossover hasn't substantially changed the sound of metro-gay/suburban-straight (for the two are in fact effectively the same for the purposes of this conversation) clubs, it's just meant that instead of opting for a Freemasons or Thunderpussy remix of an R&B hit the DJ can play the original (the bigger effect, which I might talk about later, has been on commercial radio). It has helped, however, to further divorce these environments from dance music culture, a process which has been ongoing for the past 10 years by my reckoning (perhaps longer: 2000 was when I could start going to clubs). In the gay world, proper clubs or club nights still exist but these feel increasingly the preserve of an ecstasy and crystal meth consuming sub-set. I've continued to use the tripartite breakdown of queer/camp/homo to describe club nights where you're likely to hear either Hercules & Love Affair, Rihanna or a hard house update of Guru Josh. None of these sub-sets is gonna disappear anytime soon, and indeed they remain in a state of constant cross-hybridisation - one of my favourite nights out this year was at an event playing a queer/homo cross of Nitzer Ebb and Adonis and very hard latterday electro-house. Still, camp is probably at its highest ebb in some time, enjoying the extent to which its signature sound now dominates the charts as well.

In this not so brave new world, I suspect what is most likely to suffer is the stuff that codes camp but in more of a thoroughgoing dance music manner, though perhaps the magnetic influence of whatever is successful means that the homo clubs formerly playing hard house et. al. will come around. If so they ought to play this, one of the tracks I've surprised myself by returning to regularly all year. Chris Sorbello is some local chick with a thin, barely there voice that would have stood her in better stead during the highpoint of trance-pop's second coming, but now means she is obliged to join the dots between that and Annie. Even if this is done out of obligation, it works, the frailty of her voice necessitating a delicacy and precision in the song's construction so as to avoid stomping all over her. This stands in stark contrast with most-Guetta pop which - also in part because it's designed for the radio - can rely on the instant-recognition-factor and (usually) belting power of the star vocalist to rise above the clomping, harshly buzzing sledgehammer production. The original of "So Lonely" (best heard in its Club Mix form) is fine perky electro-pop, all shivery arpeggios and whizzing, whirring sound effects and slashing, magisterial synth chords, splitting the difference between house-pop's unsubtle sensuality and trance-pop's bloodless austerity in a manner that an uncountable many have tried but almost always failed to master.

Hook'n'Sling used to be most crude of the crude club remixers, but as with many in their belated-electro-house generation (formerly peddling a club form of the Guetta sound avant la lettre) they have moved on to a kind of belated electro-minimal sound, navigating a space between Benny Benassi and Booka Shade circa 2005; the result is probably the most expansive form of what passes for commercial dance in 2010. I love the restlessness of their remix of "So Lonely", which offers half a dozen takes on the original's wispy melancholy: pulsing, ominous bass; fragile synth chords; stirring strings; insistent minor key arpeggios; a ridiculous accelerating snare-drum breakdown (over a cheesy looped "Say! Say! Say!"); a sudden sideways swerve into a "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of These)" homage (which really shouldn't work at this stage); and then a bringing together of all of these elements in an oddly dreamy finale.

Although discreet moments of the track surprise, Hook'n'Sling's approach in general is so familiar that there is no way that it could be considered "surprising"; it's purely functionalist, an application of what the remixers do best to what the song's original incarnation will accommodate. And yet its functionalism is in service of an emotional and emotive product: if "So Lonely" isn't exactly tears on the dancefloor material, than at least its propulsiveness and its dreaminess converge in a space that is as reflective as it is energetic, inviting a kind of retreating into oneself, a focus on physical response as a kind of insulation from sadness. Populist club music can do this in a way that Guetta-pop struggles with, because Guetta-pop (like most chart pop) is music as dialogue, songs of love and desire and celebration from the singer to you, from you to your friends or your next pick-up. "So Lonely" exists in dance music's realm of the one and the many: in the middle of a crowded dancefloor and utterly alone.

deej likes this

Shawnna ft. T-Pain - Nappy Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSGIK-eZKBw

I think I am still recovering from the shock of hearing Shawnna's "R.P.M." a horribly belated two years ago. Shawnna's double-time flow when it's on is on, its percussive precision matching the beat with an adhesive closeness that is thrilling just to listen to - to the point that it takes me ages even to pay attention to what it is she's actually saying (see also "Shake Dat Shit". Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "R.P.M." was that Shawnna was even able to go toe to toe with Twista, who it goes without saying is the master of this sort of thing.

Twista isn't on "Nappy Boys" (T-Pain fills in serviceably I guess), but he's loomed large over my 2010 listening generally, not just through his own tracks like "The Heat", but through his clear influence on Yelawolf and also, I suspect, Nicki Minaj. I'm not sure if Nicki is also taking her cues from Shawnna, or if (conversely) Shawnna, watching and envying Nicki's rise, has decided she needs to remind everyone of her own mastery of double-time. Whatever, I love "Nappy Boys": its fanfare-laden arrangement, its ominously graceful beat, but most of all Shawnna's voice, filling every second of the track with increasingly complex, rhythmic, oddly accented rhymes whose content is less important than the sheer joy of its rising urgency and absurdity in tandem with the creeping apocalyptic tension of the arrangement. Though I am frequently snagged on lines like "now they wanna try me like I ain't illuminati", they're not really the point of this song. Shawnna prefers familiar monosyllabic words that she can flex against the beat like bats - bang bang skeet skeet bling bling my ring - and then delight at the resulting collisions.

In the battle between form and content for hearts and minds, form usually loses out: note how quickly the hype around Lil' Wayne became less about his flow and more about the funny words he was using; his own quality took a nosedive when he appeared to accept that explanation of his success. Shawnna, likewise, probably will continue to slip beneath the crossover radar (certainly relative to Nicki) at least in part because her charm is less about her words and more about the way she uses them, the sheer presence of her voice even when she's not in double-time mode. Lex often talks about Ciara singing songs like she dances (and credit to Lex for putting me onto "Nappy Boys" in the first place) and Shawnna here makes me think of a dancer, wowing not with each move in itself but with the control and exactingness of its execution: like, the way she seems to come in one beat to early on her first verse, until you realise this slight stance askew from the beat was what she intended all along. Even the way she increasingly leans on a long-vowel possibly-British nasal accent as the tune progresses is not done with the (content-aimed) persona-swapping dazzle of Nicki but rather as a kind of diagonal twist on her movements, like driving up onto the sidewall of a lane in a car-race arcade game. It would be easy to say that she's the one biting Nicki in this regard - and maybe she is - but even if that's the case she takes that idea and makes it completely her own.

tim you might really like the twista album actually -- some really unconventional stuff on it

nice analysis of rap style too

Yeah the Twista album is definitely on my must-hear list.

On a related note, I've maxed out my bandwidth for the month so I won't be able to add links for the last few to the facebook group until after new years I expect.

note how quickly the hype around Lil' Wayne became less about his flow and more about the funny words he was using; his own quality took a nosedive when he appeared to accept that explanation of his success.

otm (& sad, it was always about "his flow")

great post/great song! was so disappointed we heard nothing else from shawnna this year - there was that kerfuffle about her leaving disturbing tha peace (luda's battle of the sexes album was originally meant to be a collab between him and her) and getting signed to nappy boy instead. then this, then nothing. not that i was 100% convinced that signing with t-pain was a good move for her.

I think I am still recovering from the shock of hearing Shawnna's "R.P.M." a horribly belated two years ago

secret best song of 00s

if someone who managed to nab the deadboy one before it got taken down wants to webmail me a copy i would be much obliged btw

Drake - Find Your Love (Drew Austin Remix)

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

http://www.sendspace.com/file/m0qdl6

The second Drake remix to make its way onto the list, this time in bumping, paranoid UK Funky style. I actually heard this version of "Find Your Love" before the original, with the result that the latter sounded unnaturally leaden and defeated by comparison, as if it was in fact playing at the wrong speed, Drake's dragging "hey, hey, hey" refrain feeling like a hook he's too lethargic to care about before he's even gotten it out of his mouth. Drew Austin gets that Drake's droney, android-like voice is actually perfect for pitching up to house tempos, because while this mitigates somewhat his low-functioning house robot vibe, it simultaneously turns what's left into a kind of twitchy inhumanity, the nasal smoothness of a single-minded and obsessive replicant whose delusions are encased in cast-iron logic.

The first words, "I'm more than just an option / refuse to be forgotten", already a vaguely creepy opening salvo in an ostensible love song, take on a darker complexion over the remix's spartan kicks, snares and claps, reminding me of the Terminator 2 scene where the T-1000 is blown to pieces, then melts and reforms. The looped vocals spill over each other slightly, resembling the ravings of a maniac, or perhaps more the frying synapses of a pre-programmed cyborg. Still, if Drake is falling apart here he holds into his solitary goal with sufficient certainty to remain dangerous: "I better find your loving / I better find your heart" no longer just a declaration but a threat.

Apart from robots, this tune puts me in mind of people I've met on crystal meth, in its bluntness and single-mindedness and nervousness and naked desire. Or it reminds me of lusting after someone on the dancefloor only to watch them hook up with someone else. In the case of either comparison, the key is the way the tune stands in on a precipice where sexual need becomes destructive, where one's inability to find satisfaction casts a pall over everything, your quarry's refusal to acquiesce becoming an affront that cannot be allowed to stand. "It's more than just a mission / You hear but you don't listen," Drake complains, and you know that whatever happens he has no intention of going home empty-handed.

Austin's skeletal arrangement is taut, even rigid, stuttering snares and artificial hand claps lashing Drake's vocal like whipcracks. The tune bounces on its snares, but the groove generates its power from the friction of this syncopation against the strict lines of the kickdrum, summoning up memories of Adamski's punishing "Killer", the vaguely industrial counter-rhythms smashing themselves against the implacable 4X4 beat. Here that tension is regulated masterfully, but so simply, through the addition and substraction of a ticking hi-hat, which quite perversely seems to ramp up the tension whether appearing or disappearing, summoning either pulse-racing urgency or a stark, unsettling isolation.

Mario Basanov - Up

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

Between early 2008 and mid 2010 the level of my attention to regular house fell off a cliff. This was mostly due to uk funky buying up all the real estate in my brain, but in part also due to the way in which so much house seemed to beat a hasty retreat away from the ravey, cheesy but satisfying stabs at mind-altering expansiveness that was minimal's legacy, and into a straight retread of familiar deep house tropes, only more, er, minimal than before - if not exactly the worst of all possible worlds, then certainly among the less interesting of familiar ones.

I've gotten back into house quite dramatically in the past six months. Is the change in the music or in me? My temptation is to suggest the following scenario: two or three years ago the music was between two stools, still possessed of an auteur-like seriousness (if not minimal then pious US alter ish) but reluctant to engage in the kind of showy theatrics that might justify it. Now, the music simply has nothing to do with minimal anymore (or at least very little), is equally free of the need to worship before the US masters as some kind of oppositional gesture, and consequently is free to divest itself of that seriousness and approach the task of being regular straight up house with a much more playful streak - of course, this still means a lot of US house aping, but with a great deal more pleasure than before. In particular, it feels like those elements of the deep house scene into edits and other forms of pop revivalism have experienced a kind of feedback loop simpatico with the disco edits scene, such that the two seem increasingly to resemble one another and even start to merge at some points - certainly a lot of the house I've responded to this year has been on the slow side, and it seems like everyone makes (their name with) edits.

This is all kind of bullshit though, in the sense that if you knew where to look this entire development was already occurring in a full-on sense throughout this whole period - look no further than the work of The Revenge and Linkwood. And it's not like it's even that far divorced from Moodymann or a whole bunch of moodymenn. So why does it feel different now? Perhaps there's been a tipping point I've missed or (more likely) perhaps there's been a tipping point in me, a moment when this trend had gathered enough momentum while my focus was elsewhere that I could switch my gaze back and pretend that something new was happening (critics do this all the time btw). And also, maybe I've recharged my batteries enough to find radically uneventful house records fun again. Which is why I've spent so much time listening to people like Soul Clap, Nicolas Jaar, Art Department, Maceo Plex, No Regular Play et. al. Records like these have been floating around all along, I'm just in the right frame of mind for them now. Having said that, the strong undercurrent of 80s R&B influences in 2010 deep house certainly doesn't hurt (and for a nice sampler you could do a lot worse than start with Soul Clap's free EP of R&B edits).

None of which has a great deal to do with Mario Basanov's "Up", which even more than any of the aforementioned material really could have come out in 2001 or 2004 or 2007 as easily as now. Indeed five years ago this tune would have been called Julien Jabre's "Swimming Places": endlessly rising, effortlessly building piano-based anthem-house, eerie background atmospherics, no more layers or even notes than are absolutely necessary to smash the dancefloor - though that said the interplay between the one-note piano riff, the descending synth chords and ascending bassline is excellent. The entire purpose of this music is not to wow you with craft but rather to evoke a kind of empty but aching nostalgia for a moment that you may not have lived or even be in a position to imagine, and I increasingly suspect that for tunes to attain this specific vibe they need to be somewhat timeless themselves. Not in the boring rock critic sense, but in the sense of dance music which carefully evades as far as is possible the kind of timeliness that is so much dance music's appeal. The tune's sonic biases - organic and retro but not so ostentatiously as to timestamp it, delicately constructed but by no means a riot of detail - may be very 2010, but as an idea "Up" could exist in any number of styles; you could easily imagine a "neo-trance" version of this in about 2006. No matter what the co-ordinates of style and technique, obviousness will find its way to the surface.

Through all the tidal drifts back and forth characteristic of all but the most determinedly single-minded of house scenes, tunes like "Up" act as a kind of glue, like, "whatever else we might think, surely we can all agree on this." More than that though, it serves as a reminder of dance music's function above and beyond (or rather, through) the affectations of fashion, its communicability of feeling that arrives formal and empty - all the better for you to fill it yourself. It's a vibe I'd been ignoring for a while now, and it's nice to be reminded of it.

My backlog of these is getting a bit daunting, will try to correct this over the next few days.

Also can't recommend highly enough Soul Clap's podcast for Resident Advisor last year - similar in feel to those awesomely supine Peter Visti mixes from way back when.

xpost -- It's all good, sir. I need to catch up with this all properly myself!

TNT - Running

One of the nice things about dancehall is that indie-discourse (in the broadest sense - what Frank Kogan used to call PBSification) is happy either to take it or leave it well alone, there's few if any attempts to create or search for a cornier or more respectable version of it (where such attempts do exist, they're outsider stuff like The Bug or Rhythm & Sound which can happily exist in its own universe). The closest you get is maybe non-"slack" stuff targeted at older nostalgists and college types, this year's model probably being the Damian Marley/Nas album, though even there we're talking a dancehall equivalent of missing De La Soul rather than, say, critics losing their shit over Kanye changing the face of rap. The key distinction is that critics - even those with no business doing so - will always imply that they have some kind of stake in the development of the entire genre of hip hop or dance music or etc, such that what they praise and condemn is a microcosm of what they praise or condemn in the style generally, each endorsement secretly a polemic. Whereas critics don't feel this way about dancehall by and large, in part because they usually don't care enough and in part because they correctly sense that dancehall really does not give a fuck what they think.

A side-effect of this is that it's difficult to understand the place of unexpected one-offs in dancehall, to feel out the various sides of the kinds of debates that will automatically spring up when Kanye samples King Crimson or whatever. Things can become more defined if the argument can be framed in ad hominem terms, but that leads away from a consideration of genre in itself: M.I.A.'s early dancehall rips were rarely considered in terms of how well they functioned as dancehall, because M.I.A.'s own public image and backstory caused them to be considered as a whole 'nother thing by friend and foe alike. But ad hominem critiques rarely interest me, and at any rate I'm not very good at them.

You could probably set one up for TNT, the dancehall girl-group of Tifa, Natalie Storm and Timberlee, their hypercolour cut'n'paste visual aesthetic and sexually lascivious badgirl personas making them beneficiaries and victims of, if not Pitchforkification, then certainly Faderification, belonging to some kind of international cadre of dayglo urbanites updating new wave funky freshness for our more beat conscious era. Or something like that. This kind of narrative works more in terms of peripheral details - album covers, lines of patronage, a willingness to dabble in house and UK funky and so on - than in the actual performances and characters of the girls themselves, which are squarely within the Lady Saw/Ce'cile continuum. But it's enough to make TNT sightly liminal figures, a point of communication between the inside of dancehall and its outside. It makes them perfect candidates to produce a song like "Running" and make it work, but it's also made me feel more trepidation about wheeling out the praise (especially in a year when I heard only a sprinkling of dancehall) than I might otherwise.

I got over that though: all the time I've been musing on the success or otherwise of "Running" I've also kept returning to it, which is the bigger point. On the a-side is the more typical, feverish "Hot Gyal", all clacky Timbaland-circa-2001 percussion and vamping insouciance. "Running" is rather more inscrutable, a solemn pagan hymn sung with an unexpected and mysterious (because what has inspired it?) reverence. I suspect it's about vampires: "I see the sun come up and out, I'm slowly walking in its light, and it's killing me." Or it's a song about vampires that's secretly about something else, but if so I can't follow the lines of metaphorical extension far enough to guess what its true target is. TNT make "Running" work by not leaning too hard on the theatrics; in fact the tune is filled with moments of odd gentleness and reserve, a lazy "da da da da da da da da" hook, low-pitched and barely-there choruses which evoke a kind of stunned exhaustion, the muted close-harmony vocals blurring the line between one presence and many.

It's the song that really grabs me, but the arrangement is pretty great too, its whumping bass throb and heavy kickdrum suggesting techno (and in particular the Timo Maas remix of "Doom's Night") emanating from an underground bunker somewhere in the distance, all sound muted and fogged over like you've covered your ears to listen to your own pulse. I like to think that if the song is about vampire suicide then the music is designed to simulate the painful throb of other people's blood in the singers' ears, a music which blanks out the external world as it pulses with the wrongness of dawn's arrival. It's the music which makes "Running" feel ostentatiously eclectic, but the tune never comes across as ham-fisted, perhaps because its surround-sound reactor hum feels so disconnected from any kind of modish genre affectation that might actually serve some arguable crossover purpose; and, even more, because the unity of sound and song is so claustrophobically complete that it's like both emerged spontaneously and without human intervention, let alone deliberation. In this sense "Running" is a true one-off, a tune that actually doesn't mean anything, has no stake in any discussion outside of itself, and exists purely for its own unguessable purposes: "the night is dying, and my heart can hear it's crying, I ignore it's agony, and it's slowly killing me..." Intoxicating stuff.

Don't actually have a youtube for this but you can hear it at the bottom of this short hype piece as (lol) The Fader:

http://www.thefader.com/2010/12/08/premiere-tnt-running-dj-ayres-remix-mp3/

Nicki Minaj - Catch Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrlcnGTK4qU

Lex's line on Pink Friday is correct: take out the weak tracks, sub in the six "bonus tracks" plus eliminated first single "Massive Attack" and you have a pretty great album, one which actually captures a lot of what makes Nicki such a fun and compelling listening experience. There's a lot of ironies about Pink Friday, one being that an artist whose primary attraction is her lack of a single character (the way her flow, with its multitude of accents, unexpected references, even the hashtag raps, seems constantly to flit away from any attempt to say exactly who she is - though I could probably do without any more faux-Brit accents) makes the mistake of trying to promote a sympathetic unitary persona who you should feel for. Which is like Nicki missing her own point: at her best Nicki would (or at least should) be oblivious to or contemptuous of your sympathy.

As it is, much of Pink Friday, in its desire to please anyone and everyone including those who might be weirded out by Nicki's typical style, betrays a certain lack of self-confidence, both a lack in Nicki and a lack in mainstream hip hop generally. Nicki pulling the underperforming, voodooist first single "Massive Attack" from the record entirely and replacing it with emo jams designed to appeal to "Your Love" fans is a smaller, less obvious symptom of the malaise that results in B.O.B. collaborating with Rivers fucking Cuomo. This is not something that is true of hip hop generally by any stretch (in fact I listened to and loved more rap in the past year than in the previous five), but it's concerning that mainstream hip hop, once defined by its omnivorous appetite for chewing up outside material and turning it into fuel, now so regularly adopts a position of subservience towards the current bennetton rainbow of eclectic-but-pasty pop music.

Of course this leads us to the next (predictable) irony, that a rapper who thrives on rapping over productions as unpredictable, dense and schizophrenic as her raps are should choose so many arrangements that sound like any other monolithic 2010 rap-powerballadry ish, mostly centered around a single obvious sample (e.g. "Your Love" sampling the backing vocals from Annie Lennox's "No More I Love Yous"). I don't mind this so much actually, if only because it reminds me vaguely of Lil Kim's The Notorious K.I.M. (the weaker parts admittedly, but then Nicki's tracks are more ruthlessly catchy too), but it seems, again, like a massive case of point-missing. Especially given every single one of the bonus tracks witnesses Nicki getting herself entirely and precisely. Which is not, I should hasten to add, to say that I want every Nicki tune to be some kind of ostentatious display of her own aggressive weirdness a la "Massive Attack"; in fact some of my favourite past Nicki moments have been when she gets all emo and reflective, like "Keys Under Palm Trees" from the Beam Me Up, Scotty mixtape. So what's the distinction then?

"Catch Me" offers one answer: a relentless machinic Carribean beat and amusical synth squeals provide a deliberately spartan setting for Nicki's tale of a failed affair, her voice typically firing off with, if not notable speed, then certainly a kind of inevitable velocity, like a rock tumbling down a hill. Nicki here offers a character that is believably her while not simplifying or negating her past personae, the talkative neurotic charismatic dominant lover who suddenly finds herself at the end of someone else's tether, unable to achieve resolution through the power of words alone but unable to stop trying anyway. Perhaps though what we're hearing is Nicki's imaginary conversation with her ex, which is really a conversation with herself: "You wanted it oh so bad to prove points / but your game always makes me lost points / and your game always makes me concur / and maybe I should have never taken you from her" is the kind of obsessive rehearsal of argument-points and counter-points that feels very real and familiar (sadly the line straight after this is a bit LOL strained).

The rock always hits bottom though, each wordy verse giving way to the more simple confession, "I have given my all / funny how you could always make small / I have given my all / catch me", itself leading into first a depressive whispered bridge, then one of Nicki's morose little-girl-lost vocal choruses, which work precisely because she ain't a great singer, but only in this specific way, like something she's pushed into by her neurosis and against her better judgment, rather than a tic she can build her career around.

"Catch Me" falls neatly into the time-honoured "ambushed by unexpected emotion" category, in a manner that reminds me pretty heavily of many of my favourite hard-hitting but corny emotive dancehall anthems like Wayne Wonder's "Everyday" (especially since both rock spooky choral backing vocals). This makes sense in part because of the general rule that Nicki works better the closer she drifts towards a dancehall sensibility, and more specifically because Nicki like so much dancehall can deal best with emotion by framing it as the wasteland beyond and around the excess, as the fear of the comedown (physical, emotional, romantic) when the drugs and the alcohol and the lust run out. On "Everyday" this is a sensation only, Wayne extolling the high roller lifestyle while his vocals and the arrangement give shape to the yawning chasm of emptiness he pretends to strut across. "Catch Me" faces the wasteland squarely, but from the vantage point of the border or threshold, the point where all her flash and energy and enthusiasm become aware of their own possible extinction. Rather than pretend they don't exist, it creates a sense of something being at stake for all those other Nickis - those brash, bold, ballsy Nickis of "Muny" and "Did It On 'Em" and "Blow Your Mind" - by creating a wounded persona at their core.

Bonus vibes - Wayne Wonder's 2004 classic "Everyday":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDROv9KpGD4

it's concerning that mainstream hip hop, once defined by its omnivorous appetite for chewing up outside material and turning it into fuel, now so regularly adopts a position of subservience towards the current bennetton rainbow of eclectic-but-pasty pop music.

perfect

"catch me"! love that one. the cavernous, yawning beat really magnifies everything you describe tim.

deal best with emotion by framing it as the wasteland beyond and around the excess, as the fear of the comedown (physical, emotional, romantic) when the drugs and the alcohol and the lust run out

amazing

Never heard the TNT track but it sounds like it's going to be fantastic.

These have links on the facebook equiv btw.

goddamn "nappy boy" is so amazing

BANG BANG SKEET SKEET

The Detroit Experiment - Think Twice (Henrik Schwarz Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgpsRSNKjU&feature=related

Henrik Schwarz is one of those rare producers who remains captivating without ever really growing as an artist. It's not that he simply repeats himself - there are artists who've spent their entire career fruitfully ploughing a narrower furrow than Schwarz will regularly explore over the course of one track, and his tracks rarely blur into one another. Rather, it's that everything he does feels like it's part of some constellation of ideas he's been carrying around with him for a good five or six years now: interweaving house, techno, jazz, funk and afrobeat, and always obsessing over how the rendezvous between dance music on the one hand and everything else on the other can seem as organic and unforced and right-feeling as possible. Schwarz tracks can (still) surprise, but less out of a sense of unprecedented newness (in fairness, not a standard we demand of many people in dance music these days), and more simply shock at the perfection of the articulation, and his pretty much unrivaled capacity to weave his favourite elements into still-exciting baroque extravaganzas.

By Schwarz standards, his remix of The Detroit Experiment's house classic "Think Twice" is... if not his most straightforward work, than certainly one of his more literal efforts, spelling out the cunning of his aesthetic in a manner that allows the listener to make sense of his approach generally. The tune opens with a kickdrum and dominating, asymmetrical piano riffs - not from the original track - whose time signature I haven't had sufficient focus to actually determine, quickly joined by slashing two-note cello bass, swelling background strings, tambourine percussion and then finally a loose trumpet solo. At last, it seems, an element from the original tune, except as far as I can tell the trumpet solo in Schwarz's remix is entirely different to The Detroit Experiment's original. Which may be just as well, because the trumpet's wanderings are so well-suited to the insistent, driving piano riff that it's impossible to imagine either existing in isolation from the other.

So much of Henrik's skill goes into not merely blending dance and non-dance motifs, but also thinking about how the latter can mimic and stand in for the former, giving you all the satisfactions of a typical dance record despite his ornate eclecticism. In this regard he is a consummate dance producer even when he's not deploying kick drums and riffs. This is one reason why he's such a great live performer and has made his career out of playing live (to the point of releasing two live albums but no studio albums): his tunes aren't really songful (though they're often built around songs) and they aren't really tracky (though they're often minimalist and repetitive and groove-oriented and focused on production trickery). Rather, they're all about the build, the gradual accumulation of elements like the disparate parts of a puzzle finding one another and fusing together.

On "Think Twice" this means that about three minutes in the trumpet suddenly starts playing along with the descending piano riffs, and shortly afterwards gorgeous tribal percussion arrives, and it's like, "and I thought I was enjoying this before?" Shortly afterwards a dirty synth bassline starts playing along underneath the piano riffs, and then as if some wire has been tripped the track goes insane - more kick drums, hyperactive synth riffs (again mirroring the piano), and the most euphoria-inducing handclaps I've heard this year. Far from the seeming looseness of its beginnings, at this point the track is so tightly wound, so rigidly locked into its groove that it seems as monstrously controlling as any trance record, and all built around that same piano riff whose time signature I still haven't bothered to work out. The trumpet arrives again for another solo, but in a context where the entire track has turned into a peaktime anthem, it's just one more voice in the mix. Only now, when all of this has occurred, does a melody nicked from the original "Think Twice" suddenly emerge out of the swelter.

When I saw Schwarz play live the other night, this was maybe the absolute pinnacle of the evening, and I could swear it went on for twice as long as it does here (in the best possible sense), an intoxicating interweaving of ideas that you could dance to forever because you'd never tire of following their looping lines and curls and knots around each other. Again, this is a microcosm for Schwarz generally: he can continue to coast on these endless iterations of his craft because his tunes are so effortlessly beautiful, so effortlessly anthemic that they achieve a perversely eternal functionalism, as welcome in any context as "Strings of Life" (which, come to think of it, is perhaps a good reference point for this tune). Perverse, because on the surface Schwarz's love of stylistic frippery should seem to doom him to datedness sooner or later. He evades this fate by making trumpets and cellos come on as fundamental building blocks fully as much as 303s and 808s.

thanking u for this

sounding very some dude right now bro xp

― lyrics is weak ... like clock radio similes (deej), Sunday, December 26, 2010 3:53 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

you should've waited for me to post about the drums first

― BIG SANTA aka the sleighdriver (J0rdan S.), Sunday, December 26, 2010 4:57 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

gotta say i love that the shorthand zing about me has become "oh he cares more about the SOUND of things than the identity politics behind the music, how quaint, how precious"

lol -- that was a shorthand zing about you posting about drums. that's really it.

yeah but deej's was more "lol caring about the minutiae of songwriting and vocal performance"

every thread now, guys?

responding to a weeks old zing = nagl

hadn't looked at the thread in a while. wasn't trying to start something, was just joking around.

O_O that henrik schwarz remix is incredible. i need to hear this in a club right now.

yeah, it's astonishing. i guess this is related to the stuff he was doing w/ Bugge Wesseltoft, like that time they played Red Bull Academy/RFH?

yeah - looking at the bio for the detroit experiment itself, it seems to be a collaborative project along similar lines, though far jazzier? i had never heard the original "think twice" either (it's pretty great itself, then the henrik schwarz remix followed and blew my mind)

further to the ramadanman "work them" post upthread, here is kid sister rapping over it and acquitting herself rather well

cant here this at work but is the detroit exp's version a cover or edit of the donald byrd song?

I would gladly paypal several dollars to the first ilxor that comes up with a script that blocks deej, whiney, and some dude from seeing each other's posts on any thread. I like reading each of them individually and they all bring something solid to the table, but jesus they bring out the worst in each other.

*hear

weve moved on jon

in this thread, maybe, but i think my comment pretty much stands in general for you three

ugh dont make it worse than it already was

and shortly afterwards gorgeous tribal percussion arrives, and it's like, "and I thought I was enjoying this before?"

^^ man so true

i much prefer the mark e remix of think twice, even if it's not as big a twist on the original. btw the original always reminds me a lot of "music sounds better with you"

The other massive highlight in Schwarz's live set was his (surprisingly machinic) edit of "Wanna Be Starting Something", though his remix of Emmanuel Jal's "Kuar" and his edit of Bill Withers "Who Is He (And What Is He To You)" also sounded amazing live.

i think the detroit exp version IS a distorted weird version of the donald byrd right??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpFpRqGFQg

"Flowerz" sample tim!

pretty sure the sax & tpt samples are from that ??

Serani - Skip To Ma Lou

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aArwuAPK1xA&feature=player_embedded#!

My big, belated dancehall discovery of 2010 was Serani, who I already knew obv but really really got into last year, via his two mixtapes The Future and The Future 2 (as at the time of writing I've yet to check out his official 2009 album No Games, out of some curious loyalty to the series I started with). Luckily for this Overflowing Bounty one of those mixtapes was actually released in 2010, and you should all go search it immediately. Love dude's slightly strained, habitually stressed-sounding emotional singing style, which conveys a certain intensity of enthusiasm - or paranoia, or heartsickness, or whatever the song calls for. And the great strength of his work is that the extremity of these moodswings allows his songs to seem much more diverse, stacked in a row, than they would with probably anyone else. I'm tempted to say that most of the time I like Serani in the paranoid/heartsick/whatever modes that allow his earnest wail to flower fully, but it's probably more true to say that Serani sounding aggrieved to the point of tears is just more mnemonic, more what immediately springs to mind when I think of the guy.

Because Serani in happy go lucky mode is also really awesome, as "Skip To Ma Lou" handily demonstrates. I get the impression this was his biggest hit from last year, although we're certainly not talking a hit of "Hold Yuh" style proportions, and I've never heard this tune in public, so I really have no way of knowing. But to me it sounds like a tune that should have been a massive crossover - not in the sense of "if there was any justice X would be a number one hit" where X is Wilco or some Scandavian pop duo or even Cassie, and the failure of this to occur is (in the speaker's opinion) an indictment of the tastes of the masses. Because masses, any masses, would surely like this tune, and its failure to be heard by those masses is a mere technicality. If I'm wrong about this, if it's actually the case that most people couldn't be fucking with a tune so unabashedly cheerful as "Skip To My Lou", please don't pierce my illusions.

But let's talk about things to like here:

1. The hype man shouting out cities around the world, and sounding increasingly flustered and uncertain of his world geography (e.g. "I'm talking about... (pause)... Israel!"), to the point that the question "What about Japan?" seems like more of a genuine question than perhaps it was meant.

2. "It's Serani! Oh na na na na na!" - unbeatable announcement of arrival by song's main star.

3. Its bouncy soca-ish piano groove. Singjay-dancehall in particular often does sound like soca but "Skip To Ma Lou" really captures the sun-rising optimism of the latter style pretty much perfectly.

4. The curiously wheedling quality to Serani's imploring attempts to get you onto the dancehall. Like, no really! Dancing is fun! Don't spoil my night!

5. Serani's white suit and white sunglasses in the video clip are super slick.

In fact the only thing remotely disappointing about this tune is that the dance move described by its title and chorus doesn't appear to involve the partner swapping maneuver implied. Which is kind of a shame because it'd be kind of fun for the tune's effervescence also to invite rampant promiscuity. On the other hand, it might despoil the song's sunshine innocence, and it might make it weird when Serani says that even little kids request it.

By the way Deej yeah I think you're right about Byrd/Detroit Exp.

Marcos Cabral & Shux - Lifetime Groove

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX5xwoZbjMI

Many of my favourite newfangled (as in: from 2007 onwards) "disco edits" aren't really true to the original notion of a disco edit - when Todd Terje adds tribal percussion and swathes of dub echo and even the Diwali Riddim beat to 80s tunes like "Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes" or "Walk Like An Egyptian", the phrase "disco edit" is deployed more for its associations with a certain revivalist sensibility than because there's anything about the product that can be distinguished from a full-fledged remix.

"Lifetime Groove" is a disco edit in the fullest sense, its horizon of possibility formed and constrained by the original tune - in this case, New Edition's "Once In A Lifetime Groove". Almost exactly twice the length of the 12 inch version of the New Edition original, the edit's singular qualities built on its relationships of more and less with its source material. "Lifetime Groove" is more in the sense of extending the tune's groove to the limits of endurance, its near twelve minutes unfurling with a glacial slowness speaking of patience, contentment and, above all, trust: trust that whatever is coming will arrive in its own sweet time, and at the exact right time.

It's less in the sense that Cabral and Shux deliberately deny themselves the full arsenal of weapons the original tune extends to them, choosing only those aspects considered most necessary (the rippling bass-driven post-discoid electro-R&B arrangement) and the most succulent (the most sweetly yearning falsetto vocal snatches), and then further denying themselves the chance of gorging on the most succulent selections, hiding the retained lead vocals as a fleeting appearance in the very centre of track, and surrounding them with aching expenses of instrumental groove punctuated only by the hymnal backing vocals "the sun goes up / the sun goes down / searching here / searching there."

And then again, it's more, because the unbeatably executed fusion of these two countervailing impulses - to expand out the groove while forestalling its climaxes almost indefinitely - makes "Lifetime Groove" the most consummately tantric piece of music I can think of offhand, its gradual accumulation of intensity more natural, more inevitable than ever before, until when the scintillating lead vocals erupt it's like a climax you couldn't have prevented even if you'd been warned. I don't think any music in 2010 made me feel as sheerly happy as this tune, as mystically assured that the human capacity to create (not singularly, but through building on others' achievements) something this eternal was somehow inextricably linked to an essential human capacity for goodness. "This kind of love is a once in a lifetime groove", New Edition sing, but this tune speaks not of scarcity or uniqueness but of plenitude, the promise that every desire will be met if you just extend yourself and wait.

ha, "skip to ma lou" is awesome -- i wanna say that it was a bit too kitschy to crossover to the US but "no games" was huge & it's no different thematically than "teach me how to dougie" or w/e -- oh well

yeah that new edition edit is basically the only '10 edit i played into the ground

I'm not familiar with the original but the sense of space in "Lifetime Groove" is beautiful.

I think it's maybe the only ridiculously long disco edit that also couldn't possibly be a second shorter than it is.

The original has all the same elements and is a great song but returning to it after the edit it feels rushed and unfinished.

i know the b-side is way inferior but i'd been looking for an instrumental of "club lonely" for a while so that 12" was a godsend

lifetime groove just possibly might be my favorite so far

With the exception of fantasia which I wrote about early, and the glee tune which was really just something I'd been thinking about, they're supposed to get roughly better as they go along.

how many more do we have to go!!!!

About 10.

At this rate it'll be going until April :-/

THE SUN COMES UP
THE SUN GOES DOWN

<3

Mr. F thanks for sharing this stuff, wow

"lifetime groove" is such a jam. one of those things you hear played out pretty often and never get tired of

Funkystepz ft. Louise Williams - Whispers
Rudimental ft. Adiyam & MC Shantie - Midnight Affair

One trope I'm wary of is that of the "good song" in dance music. This isn't just about hard techno or drum & bass or other genres whose engagement with songs is sparing at best - a slavish devotion to songs runs entirely ashore on those genres, and song-enthusiasts and genre-enthusiasts are left with little option except mutual rejection (not to say there aren't people who think that, say, Lamb are the pinnacle of jungle, but you can spot these types a mile off). More insidious - because more successful - is the celebration of good songs in populist vocal-friendly dance genres, of which the closest to my heart are 2-step and uk funky. It's because this brand of popism run amok can survive or even prosper by latching onto these genres that it does the most damage to people's attempts to get their head around what's actually going on: a viral inhibitor that lets you see just enough so as to allow you to think you see clearly.

Of course pop-minded dance music is full of good songs, and its songfulness is often one of its key attractions, so you could rightly wonder what I'm getting at. The thing in issue here is the form of goodness (or, rather, "attraction") in dance-pop. Really I'm not interested in any kind of dance-pop transcending its roots to make songs that work in any context: the very appeal of dance-pop is its rootedness, the way in which its pop-ambition struggles up out of a dense undergrowth of sonically loaded contextual specificity. Even at its most basic, universalist level - say, Robin S's "Show Me Love" - dance-pop is governed by the logic of the dancefloor, a dancefloor that, yes, has space for singing along and singing to one another as much as it does throwing moves, but nonetheless remains a physical space, a space where sound is first and foremost determined by its physical effects (and how empty would "Show Me Love" be without the specific buzzy desirousness of its bassline).

The critical language of dance-pop needs to remain mindful of this underlying truth that what constitutes a good song in (and for) a particular genre is in large part determined by the sound-values of that genre, that the hallmarks of the song (the big-chested diva, the uplifting chorus) are effectively sonic tricks to be deployed as ruthlessly and as precisely as an arpeggio or breakbeat. Instead of asking, "what is it about this dance-pop that makes us forget about its genre" we need to ask "what is it about this dance-pop that reminds one of its genre", how are the emphases on sonic rootedness and pop-universalism intertwining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bry6gxGJVnY

These are two good songs.

"Whispers", in time-hounoured tradition, is a vocal mix of a previous instrumental tune, "Trinity Hill", which was a fine, stirring interstitial funky tune, its blurry piano chords and restless, endlessly ear-tickling beat combining to capture effortlessly the tense bounciness of funky, that sense of it as house on its toes, always tumbling forward over and over. As a tune, "Trinity Hill" isn't exactly groundbreaking - it's basically a straightforward combination of strobing piano house and the kind of airy percussive minimal deep tune that Sebo K might have played four years ago - but it was nothing if not likeable, an instant enlivener in any set.

On the vocal version, Louise Williams sings in a drifting, sighing manner that you could almost imagine her concocting on the spot, intuitively responding to the ebbs and flows in the groove. Undeniably, "Whispers" is a wispy song, but this is also its charm, its very tenuousness capturing a certain vibe of dreamy diva distraction, the eyes closed head back deliriousness of depth that the tune's "classic house" tropes always played with anyway. As a full-blown anthem or "tune of the summer" it fails utterly because it doesn't even go there: Louise or the producers or both understand that instead the role of the "song" here ultimately is to further draw out the scintillating interplay or elements. Nearly all the best Funkystepz vocal tunes - see also "For U" and especially "Lovers", released some time this year - have this same not-quite-coalesced quality, the vocal line itself a percussive counter-element flowing against rather than with the groove. It's almost like, if the vocals ever take on a life of their own independent of the beat, then something has gone wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA0wfeUVliQ

"Midnight Affair" is more typically songlike but hesitantly so, singer Adiyam seeming to put in the minimum effort necessary actually to carry the tune. Even more than on "Whispers", the vocal feels conscious of its necessary subordination to the groove, Adiyam (whose vocals are roughly comparable to Kyla's little-girl-grown-up sexiness, but as if Kyla was shaken awake and handed the microphone in bed) always arriving a beat or two late so as to give the rhythm a chance to announce itself. This is vital on "Midnight Affair" because the rhythm is so voluptuous, so delectable, a stabbing yet delicate take on funky's signature clave rhythm riddled (almost palsied) with micro-tics and hesitations, and a bassline that alternates between menacingly polite and absurdly flatulent.

Again, Adiyam's singing - dreamy, distracted, spare, filled with pauses that the beat is happy to fill - is relegated to the role of rhythmic counterpoint, even more literally than on "Whispers", the barely melodic bridge in particular seeming to drive home the explosions going on underneath. On both tunes, the vocals understand what many pop-minded listeners do not about uk funky: rather than somehow account for or mitigate the music's uncomfortable syncopation, they embrace it, intensify it. When MC Shantie's wordy, spaceless rap arrives the tentativeness of Adiyam's performance is thrown into sharp relief, its true purpose - to offer a variety of different, tensely restrained models for how to respond to the beat - laid bare, the tune itself at last succumbing to the almost unbearable desire to have something smooth to wrap itself around when everything else seems so fractured.

They're supposed to get roughly better as they go along.

― Tim F, Saturday, 5 February 2011 08:44 (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how many more do we have to go!!!!

― gr8080, Saturday, 5 February 2011 20:16 (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

About 10.

At this rate it'll be going until April :-/

― Tim F, Saturday, 5 February 2011 20:43 (3 months ago) Bookmark

?? (are these on your fb & just haven't been c/pd or did u not end up writing them? or?)

It got too busy at work to keep doing them and not have it be painful, and there was less audience interest this year I think, maybe the meme had gotten old.

this meme never gets old! but no worries if you don't have time to do it any more.

^^^

maybe just release the rest as a list?

support this idea ^^^ i think ur underestimating audience interest unless u mean outside ilx?

yeah post the list!

i always feel these are wasted being just on ilx and fb, you should think of putting them somewhere proper tim.

im mostly a lurker but i always read this

same here, would love to see the rest of the list

I support the movement for publication of Tim F choice cuts. That bit on Adiyam is spot on.

Alright then. Counting down:

Silkie - 80s Baby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xK5eyciIy8
At this point it's kind of offensive how underrated Silkie is. Because he really is the best, like, dubstep idealised. Like here, has stop-start riddimization ever been quite so shudderingly precise? Percussion banging it out of order.

Wretch 32 - Traktor (The Mike Delinquent Project Remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-B7L6suQtU
The grand return of 2-step! Don't fight it, feel it.

Lil' Boosie - Bottom To The Top
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQy7o-u8KI
Fucking love Boosie, and never more so than when he's getting all soft (in this regard see also "Green Light Anthem". Adore the uplifting 80s boogie vibe on this one. Hope you get out dude.

Carnao - Get Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csh_-ioIcQs&feature=related
Like a private daydream haunted by shadows. Stand by prior claim of strong Terence Trent D'arby vibes on this one.

Tinie Tempah - Pass Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzvGKas5RsU
Who could resist Tinie?

Jamie Woon - Night Air
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL0pTo9Z_XU
Corny like all of y'all. Funny how I was obsessed with this but have listened to the album, like, twice.

Rihanna - The Only Girl In The World
http://chloeandeddie.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/9fe7c_afcb2739-448d-4062-9ffe-bd565d077c9e.jpg
So many nights. Private salute to Catherine on this one, which gets both of us all histrionic on the dancefloor.

Screama ft. Farah - Kiss Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5zVBRwEGZQ
So want to hang out with Farah. You can measure the precise brilliance of "Kiss Me" by the extent to which Titchy proclaims to be underwhelmed by it.

Benoit & Sergio - Full Grown Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVKhwa_zONY
Amniotic high. A certain autumnal elegance at work here (I even crafted a mixtape called "Boys of Autumn" around it).

Kingdom - Fogs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVNFkGFMUE
Of all the overhyped R&B cut-ups in 2010, this is the one that stuck with me. Also thematically astute, offering the beautiful nightmare inside Beyonce's "Sweet Dream".

Vampire Weekend - White Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaTgDgCSh-w
Soz Lex.

T2 - Better Off As Friends (Lil' Silva Remix)

The very definition of apocalypse. If you're underwhelmed by Lil' Silva's stentorian sounds for the one-one, revisit this charming psycho-rave number.

Los Rakas - Abrazame (Uproot Andy Remix)

The part in the video clip where the young couple is dancing on the beach makes me happier than just about anything ever.

The Jacka & Laroo - Don't Be Scared

The feel goodiest of feel good vibes. Especially because it starts off so mournful-seeming.

The-Dream - Yamaha

Sometimes the Indie Choice is the Correct Choice. Though there's several other cuts you could sub in here. Love the way "still got your name tattooed on my back does a rainbow splay that's like the aural equivalent of MJ in the "Blame It On The Boogie" video.

Devine Collective - House Girls 6

That unholy racket.

Husalah - You Neva Know

Holds the record for the tune played and sungalong-to the most times in a row in 2010. Also, wow so pretty.

Yelawolf - Pop The Trunk
Score one for goth. Score one more for literalism in this video clip. Also this soundtracked a pretty dark time at work for me.

Diddy - Dirty Money - Ass On The Floor

Floods each and every one of my pleasure receptors. There's a moment in this - Kevin knows which - that is as fine as music gets.

Roll Deep - Green Light (Ill Blu Remix)

The most massive dance-pop ever made. You know Ill Blu are getting good when they compulsively restructure their source material to make it work better as pop music. But also, like, that beat!

Shy Child - Dark Destiny

I have so many private theories about this song, they change each time I listen, but all of them make me a bit weepy. Whatever "Dark Destiny" is about, exactly, it's clear that its emotional anchor is a love of others in spite of (because of?) their flaws. It's the most generous song of last year.

The Fives - It's What You Do

Amazingly, I didn't really pay great regard to this the first time I heard it. But then the video clip inspired incredibly strong feelings of good will in me, and then somethow the song saved/changed/justified my life. Now inexplicably tied in with memories of Spain.

Okay so ILX doesn't like me positng so many youtube links at once clearly.

Rihanna - The Only Girl In The World
http://chloeandeddie.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/9fe7c_afcb2739-448d-4062-9ffe-bd565d077c9e.jpg
So many nights. Private salute to Catherine.

T2 - Better Off As Friends (Lil' Silva Remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgDEqUeVSTE
The very definition of apocalypse.

Los Rakas - Abrazame (Uproot Andy Remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyujRXZ2Gms
The part in the video clip where the young couple is dancing on the beach makes me happier than just about anything ever.

The Jacka & Laroo - Don't Be Scared
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRXRvShQlWE
The feel goodiest of feel good vibes.

The-Dream - Yamaha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRGGFjXUo4Q
Sometimes the Indie Choice is the Correct Choice. Though there's several other cuts you could sub in here. Love the way "still got your name tattooed on my back" does a rainbow splay that's like the aural equivalent of MJ in the "Blame It On The Boogie" video.

Devine Collective - House Girls 6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZceeoRZdI
That unholy racket.

Yelawolf - Pop The Trunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np3pU-dLok4
Score one for goth. Score one more for literalism in this video clip. Also this soundtracked a pretty dark time at work for me.

Diddy - Dirty Money - Ass On The Floor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-SWwtpdZU
Floods each and every one of my pleasure receptors. There's a moment in this - Kevin knows which - that is as fine as music gets.

Roll Deep - Green Light (Ill Blu Remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyCEO4k3BXU
The most massive dance-pop ever made. You know Ill Blu are getting good when they compulsively restructure their source material to make it work better as pop music. But also, like, that beat!

Shy Child - Dark Destiny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_SWeQCFTtg
I have so many private theories about this song, they change each time I listen, but all of them make me a bit weepy. Whatever "Dark Destiny" is about, exactly, it's clear that its emotional anchor is a love of others in spite of (because of?) their flaws. It's the most generous song of last year.

The Fives - It's What You Do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOcefsTgbhE
Amazingly, I didn't really pay great regard to this the first time I heard it. But then the video clip inspired incredibly strong feelings of good will in me, and then somethow the song saved/changed/justified my life. Now inexplicably tied in with memories of Spain.

thx!!

today just got so much better! brb listening to all the music.

o shit that t2 track!

cheers tim! loading this thread up when I get home.

kudos

thanks!

Diddy - Dirty Money - Ass On The Floor

Floods each and every one of my pleasure receptors. There's a moment in this - Kevin knows which - that is as fine as music gets.

us otm

What's this special moment?

that part just before the hook where the vocals are multitracked and overlapping, they're singing "you know just what to do..."

O yah, real nice.

http://chzgifs.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/whoisatthedoorp1.gif

^me upon opening this thread today^

<3<3<3 Silkie

His EP (City Limits Volume 1.6-1.8) from last month is really good too

Also a week or two ago I posted on FB my top tunes of 2011 so far as a kind of reverse birthday present. There are some ace tunes i forgot about or have discovered since then so I'll do an addendum at some point. Also the original post included a thank you to r|t|c in particular which bears repeating.

33. David Guetta ft. RIhanna - Who's That Chick?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-uEU0Q45hE&feature=fvst

Like a lot of people sooner or later I realised that "The Only Girl In The World" was a fucking anthem. This is not that but it's pretty top-shelf Peel material, there's a certain sense of inevitability to the way it comes together that I respect. Dig the staggered trance riffs (lol at Tim observation very much in character).

32. Missy Elliott - Work It (Nicolas Jaar Rework)

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

This kinda sounds unformed and messy the first time you listen to it and... well that doesn't really change but Jaar's rippling percussion just gets more entrancing the more you listen. The point isn't really Missy's (slowed down) vocal, which while always welcome is more like the maypole around which the groove winds.

31. Hot Natured - Forward Motion

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

Because retro faux Chicago house never gets old, and because of the way the male diva vocal mimics the excellent rising bassline so expertly.

30. Scottie B - Feel Night, Feel Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REDw_MSf7bI

Sculpted, bouncy, trancey vocal UK funky that is as superficial and steroided as the (unrelated) beach babes video that accompanies it on youtube would suggest, while also attaining some of the dreaminess of Jam & Spoon's "Right In The Night". But what pushes this over the top are those lazy half-time snares that Scottie B introduces, adding a subtle pout to all the frantic posing.

29. Vybz Kartel - Colouring Book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK6RX2w98lI

When did Vybz's work become so tinged with melancholy? I think it's part of some general riposte to / accomodation of R&B's autotune era, but for the past few year's most everything has seemed wounded and forlorn. A bit much to take over an entire album, as a single shot it can be tremendously evocative. Admittedly, "Colouring Book" can attribute most of its melancholy to the riddim rather than Vybz: when he sings "galla said me pretty like a colouring book" over dolorous minor-key strings I can't help but imagine some "Where The Wild Roses Grow" style ending.

28. Ussy - Playtime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE_4300UfJQ

This awesome bassline tune falls within the time-honoured category of haunted house arcade music, radioactive bass glowering through the cellophane blue spookiness of its synth chords and the springloaded friskiness of its beat. Slick and sleek as well as sickly, its funereal vibe is a total pose; at heart its seductive strategy is straight "treat em mean keep em keen."

27. Benoit & Sergio - Principles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRCYPbXG6xU

I've discovered a lot of amazing Benoit & Sergio this year, "Principles" being only the best actually from this year. But that is still pretty great, a dream moonwalk through sleazy house-pop wherein the sleaze becomes some kind of state of being within which dancers can aspire to something more; the unexpected nobility of lasciviousness.

26. Andy J & St-Tee - Crunk VIP

http://soundcloud.com/andy-jay/crunk-vip

Slamming UK Funky tune best heard with MCs Shantie and Rankin' over the top in Marcus Nasty's 20th April 2011 Rinse FM set.

25. J Bevin - Zulu

http://soundcloud.com/deep-teknologi-records/dtr006-zulu-j-bevin

As above.

24. Yelawolf ft. Trae - Shit I Seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MURg4qesYL8

Yelawolf was my favourite discovery of 2010, and pretty immediately entered that twilight zone of "when will he blow it?" Like, a doubletime rapper from Alabama who looks like a trenchcoat high school drop-out can't help but turn into a caricature, right? "Shit I Seen" proves he hasn't fallen off yet, Yela and Trae getting paranoid quicksilver over louche soundtrack beats.

23. Swindle ft. Roses Gabor - Spend Is Dough

http://soundcloud.com/swindleuk/spend-is-dough-ft-roses-gabore

Sugary but queasy mascara'd zombie-lurch grime-house. Like the vocal - superficially sweet but actually mean-spirited - the groove here walks an expert tight rope between svelte and murderous.

22. John Talabot ft. Glasser - Families

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfPP6Y1gEic

Talabot's arrangement on "Families" sounds like a more ornate, illustrious take on The Tough Alliance's impossibly optimistic plasticky sunshine balearic, all echoey piano chords and hazy synth harmonies and a vaguely Carribean slow but propulsive groove. Glasser's happy but still typically mysterious, almost forbidding give this a more hymnal air, as joyous as an apocryphal imagined celebration of vernal equinox.

21. E-40 ft. Slim Thug & Bun-B - That Candy Paint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hW1EqdzCDI

E-40 has released so much amazing material (4 albums!) in the past year that picking out one song is a pretty arbitrary process, but for first timer action it's hard to go past the sugary slickness of "That Candy Paint", a lovely summery companion to Jacka and Laroo's "Don't Be Scared" from last year.

20. Jennifer Hudson - Where You At

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB_IvRcr04E

Love me some J-Hud big-chested drama, and she delivers the goods consummately here, really putting the "power" in "power-ballad". One of the subtly excellent things about Hudson is how good she is at locating that point in R&B where her Idol tendencies can be given full rein without overpowering the real pathos in the underlying song. Maybe it's just that for Hudson affectation always involves attitude: "Now you said you'd go to church / stop slanging, find a real job and go to work!" Consider yourself told.

19. TOK ft. Sleepy Hallowtips - Heroin Needle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw2VD0H_LdM

The rawest, craziest tune in this list, I think, an endless assault of beats and rhymes that attacks with a singleminded intensity you'd possibly forgotten people could still summon up in 2011.

18. Beth Ditto - Do You Need Someone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-xRaxdxEhA

Beth Ditto's recent EP leaves The Gossip's snarls behind entirely for glamorous, glassy Chicago house revivalism a la Azari & III. This is my favourite pick: a marvelously percolating beat, brilliant bumping bassline and lovely, shimmering vocals promising succour and sympathy - seems Beth has learnt a thing or two about being a house diva.

17. S-X - Wooo Riddim (DJ Q Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1NzVp2MSuY

Increasingly, bassline is moving into this weird ecumenical rave-pop zone where it happily steals the best ideas from grime, funky, 2-step, dubstep et. al. and I have strong suspicions that it's gonna make a dramatic comeback this year or not. This isn't that pop but it's pretty ravey, and also beautiful, churning synths and unsettled vocal samples playing off one another with masterful aplomb.

16. Richelle - Mascotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjfDD6Fy9cw&feature=related

Nominally post-dubstep or "global bass" or whatevs, "Mascotte" basically is brilliant because it resembles about 10 Jammer circa 2002 grime instrumentals intricately interwoven into the most restlessly mutational club banger ever. The first time I heard it I chalked it up to some insane feat of DJ alchemy - would never have assumed it was all just one track.

15. Tanya Stephens - Shame On You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnzlf_Ccy70

Lighters in the air. Tanya is one of my favourite pop characters, which is to say that she is one of my favourite dancehall chanteuses, which is the same thing or near enough. "Shame On You" is deceptively breezy summery fun, Tanya trying literally to shame the object of her desire into spending the night, but as the song progresses things get tinged with desperation and outrage: "I want to take legal action, if I don't get no satisfaction!"

14. Groove Theory - Tell Me (George Fitzgerald Remix)

http://soundcloud.com/george-fitzgerald/groove-theory-tell-me-remix

Have very strong, very clear memories of the video clip for "Tell Me" sending out chill vibes during the mid-90s. The best thing about this housey update is that it preserves those vibes perfectly: yes this may have a very 2011 syncopated beat but it's really about those gorgeously morphing synth chords and the nurturing 2-note bassline. And that vocal. God that vocal.

13. Art Department - I C U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wed69VmFWU

The best track on Art Department's album of lugubrious male vocal house is its closer, where the singer recedes into the middle ground as an evocative voyeuristic siren, allowing the music to patch the emotional punch: insistent cowbell, crunchy snares, melancholy arpeggios and a lovely repeated synth chord like a heart palpitating with intermingled doubt and desire.

12. Lloyd ft. Awesome Jones - Cupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tuSqN4pNF4

I love stupid big uplifting pop tracks, and "Cupid" certainly is that, quickly moving from its rumbling bass intro into Lloyd's vocal saccharine so thick you'd need a knife to start scooping it out of the jar. I think this may be his finest moment, possibly, which is saying something. The chorus really does take off.

11. Kelly Rowland ft. Lil Wayne - Motivation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1XozsBN5Z4

Gorgeously becalmed R&B reminiscent of Cassie's "Me & U", only with Cassie's whispery barelythereness replaced with a Kelly's suggestively breathy sighs, so that instead of that tune's faintly ahuman menace "Motivation" captures very precisely that post-coital spent vibe, quiet shivering tremors where full-throated bellows might have been only moments before.

10. Nicki Minaj - Super Bass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JipHEz53sU&feature=player_embedded

"Super Bass" is only now being released as a single but already it sounds like a karaoke standard, Nicki's opening rap in particular just so fun and natural to inhabit that for the first time she seems a character who, if she didn't exist, would have had to be invented. But more than this "Super Bass" is like a redemption of modern rap's plasticky fetish, its tinny synthetic flare and amateur but enthusiastic R&B chorus and yes even its dodgy autotuned middle eight attaining a certain grandeur and sense of purpose that is hard to credit when the song's not actually playing.

9. Cherine Anderson - Make Up Sex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSRi8_20fno&feature=share

"Make Up Sex" actually sounds like something you've gotta work at, an exhaustive and exhausting panorama of lust and fury - or is it fury and lust? Where one ends and the other begins is never exactly clear. Not sure what I love most about this. Is it the bizarre gonzo groove? Is it Cherine's shocked declaration, "Boy you got me breakin' breakin' glass / boy you got me cussing so low class!" Or maybe it's when she slams her man against the wall and pulls down his pants to check whether he's been getting some recent action (how does that even work?)?

8. Diddy-Dirty Money - No Ordinary Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS8aH7pLVF8&feature=player_embedded

Diddy is weirdly obsessed with Sade: in the past year he's released one song that namechecks her, one track actually called "Sade", and this, which is like one of those X Factor style "mash ups" of Diddy/Dirty Money's "Hate You Now" with Sade "No Ordinary Love" and "Soldier of Love", just to ram home the fact that, hey, how good is Sade? Well, yeah! Also this is amazing, icy and foreboding and sensual all at once, its multiple switches like a dream that keeps wandering in different directions in a way that always seems to make perfect sense.

7. Busy Signal - Pon Dem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJIFf8XH_As

Real down the rabbit hole dancehall madness. Each time you think it can't possibly get more impossibly, brilliantly overblown it, well, does.

6. Invisible Conga People - In A Hole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58mBcLTQa68

Invisible Conga People were my favourite cult niche group of a few years back, but so niche and cult that they seemed apt to disappear entirely, which they did for a while there. Luckily "In A Hole" (and it's flip, "Can't Feel My Knees") is just fantastic, managing yet another utterly new-sounding iteration of their signature collision between weird drony pop and foreboding percussive dub-techno, only the hooks are bigger and deeper than before.

5. Ill Blu - Monsta

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

Ill Blu are the finest producers in the world right now in part because of all the people they're not afraid to remind you of, from The Prodigy to Scooter to Caspa, though of those only The Prodigy at their best ever aspired to such heights of compositional grandiloquence. "Monsta" is a series of bombs that trigger each other like dominoes, build up to breakdown to explosion and repeat.

4. Britney Spears ft. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha - Till The World Ends (Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngmz7Dfs9CU

It took its brutal exploitation at the hands of Max Martin and Dr Luke for common garden variety dubstep to reach its true aesthetic pinnacle, though duh you won't hear dubstep fans saying that. But this really is fantastic, and certainly better than even the best bits on Britney's latest album, which always puts me in mind of the ex-cons at my gym . Here the dramedy of the staggering dubstep lurch sections gives the inevitable steroided 4X4 sprints more heft and release than they'd ever manage on their own.

3. Fuzzy Logick ft. Myshy - Playground

http://www.hulkshare.com/h51ggljdilv2

Remember when Basement Jaxx used to do those amazing multicoloured multitextured polyrhythmic polymorphous dance-pop tunes and it seemed like nothing could possibly be better? Yeah. The interplay here between Myshy's vaguely threatening vocal and Fuzzy's lumpen beats is magical. As with all UK Funky, this should be listened to slightly pitched up.

2. S.E.C.T. ft. Ben Westbeech - In The Park

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnRgO0jq_bM

Beautiful.

1. Purple Pop - The Way (The Living Graham Bond Dub)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aImVAxAtRY4

The Living Graham Bond's remix of "The Way" is a late 2010 tune, but this largely vocal-free dub has never been released to my knowledge and is only now getting some play (from Ill Blu and DJ Eastwood and the like). And, needless to say, it's the one to listen to. Quite simply, this is like a new standard for mindmelting percussive frenzy, squeezing about five different rhythmic attacks into one absolute blinder of a tune.

Been absorbing nearly all of Tim's 2011 list on repeat w/friends over the past week (sorry rtc for any teeth-gnashing) - urgent & key stuff, though I'd recommend against googling "ussy" + "playtime".

Or maybe it's when she slams her man against the wall and pulls down his pants to check whether he's been getting some recent action (how does that even work?)?

lmao

gonna charge you for the use of "svelte"

what about "wine & balance", tim? probably my favourite single so far

"coloring book" is really poignant in light of the skin bleaching thing

also this thread is super youtube-heavy and browser-crashing

Spotify playlist, missing quite a few as you'd expect but managed to get about 40 of them, http://open.spotify.com/user/unterwasser/playlist/4esovlsG6EeP8KCWcDJC4A

love coloring book so much

I wish I liked the vocals on Playground more than I do - would love a Fuzzy Logic dub but otherwise it feels like the first big funky vocal tune in ages that's left me kinda cold.

Haha also I had been ignoring that Beth Ditto recommendation and had no idea it was a house record. It's great!

re: Benoit & Sergio:

A certain autumnal elegance at work here (I even crafted a mixtape called "Boys of Autumn" around it)

The new "Let Me Count The Ways" EP even has an "Autumn Version" of the title track which immediately made me think of this quote. What else was on your mixtape?

S.E.C.T., NDF, Jamie Woon, No Regular Play, Destroyer, Art Department etc.

i think the boys of autumn need to man up

Lex do you have an opinion on Benoit and sergio or is that just boilerplate lex.

what i've heard is okay but not something i'd think to highlight

Been absorbing nearly all of Tim's 2011 list on repeat w/friends over the past week (sorry rtc for any teeth-gnashing)

what's this supposed to mean...?

i mean i agree with lex that if escoffier buys a loaf or two off me it'd be nice to see him do something better than just go down the park and feed the pigeons with it, but then again it's a free world and i don't despise pigeons in themselves really.

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

notes:

- i will freely admit i still don't think i've really recovered from the sore frankenlesson of the "living graham bond" fiasco

- i see you too are inadvertantly stuck on the horns of the assassin vs busy wildlife riddim dilemma (or was this just an error)

- 'super bass's "amateur but enthusiastic R&B chorus": YES SPOT ON i really do think that little juvenile delinquent "yeaah that's that super bass! voice (esther dean?) is the key to this song and what makes it so very much more likeable than when katy perry and others inadequately try to grope at the teenpop anthem with laughably straight faces

- owe you one for 'mascotte' cos otherwise had i ever even bothered to click on it i wouldnt have sat thru it to let it unfold. however regarding jammer 2002 instrumentals...

- ... i wonder if your haunted bassline foible isn't subconsciously actually tracing the old jme tropical leyline? (am kinda mad i didnt think of this again myself)

- "When did Vybz's work become so tinged with melancholy?" well er, 'sen on' you could argue. but i rather think you're conflating too far vybz's songwork with his rapping persona, and it takes away from 'coloring book's sui generis brilliance; the way he has grasped the wayne/lil b polymorphously perverse deviant anti-hero role with the full weight of jamaican social mores bearing down on him and made it more fascinating than either. 'coloring book' is its anthemic march - literally its tattoo in the martial sense - and its trudging, sorrowful admission of transfixed addiction to himself; "skin pretty like a coloring book" the most unbearably sweet perfume lingering across putrid self-indulgent decay

'coloring book' is its anthemic march - literally its tattoo in the martial sense - and its trudging, sorrowful admission of transfixed addiction to himself; "skin pretty like a coloring book" the most unbearably sweet perfume lingering across putrid self-indulgent decay

:-O

Kinda don't want to sully your response, but I was referring to the fact that Pon Di Gaza mostly seemed on this sad autotune tip - nothing as good as "Coloring Book" but in honesty there might have been gems nestling in there I was too exhausted to pan for.

- i see you too are inadvertantly stuck on the horns of the assassin vs busy wildlife riddim dilemma (or was this just an error)

haha a bit of both. That would have been caused by revisiting both so many times. Would happily go with the former except it's so short and I suspected Busy might befuddle the intended audience a bit less.

what i've heard is okay but not something i'd think to highlight

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

You could rope Benoit & Sergio into this category via "Walk & Talk" (which is more Villalobos vocals than creepy old man) but the rest of the time they're closer to that old trope of Martini Bros / Captain Comatose et al I think.

Though I must concede they don't really compare to the thousand shades of gray exhibited on the non "L Word" parts of the deniz kurtel album or the exquisitely lackluster songwriting of the tom trago album.

Is this the thread for secondhand bobbins lovers who've been confusing Benoit & Sergio with Borneo & Sporenberg for nearly a year now? But then the earlier B&S were also a Skykicking favorite back in the day, no?

Thanks for sharing this. Recommended-by-Tim playlists (mix CDs, originally) have sourced more of my favorite music than anything else for >10 years now. Much appreciated, cheers.

/fanboy

criticising the tom trago album for lacklustre songwriting is kinda like criticising a basement jaxx album for bad lyrics

the deniz kurtel album is more green than grey in my mind. forest green.

kinda toying with finishing every sentence with "forest green". forest green.

i get what you meant with the pon de gaza reference but i' guess i'm saying i see some of his tunes (like 'summertime') as busy signalish one offs, self-contained, and others as those that shore up and layer over his public persona on a more intimate larval level

i wonder if this is where deej comes in

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

― Matt DC, Thursday, June 2, 2011 6:19 AM Bookmark

More than not sure about this. I basically hate this shit.

Does that even refer to anything other than Art Department?

Cause yeah, I can see how the first two tracks of their album could put anyone off this idea for life, but off the top of my head I can't think of anything else that fits (and not surprisingly the best parts of the AD album all backtrack from this vibe significantly).

Sub in "creepy old man" with "effete dude" and sure, it's a trend, but in that case you all are being hella inconsistent.

well, in a hole, but no one doesn't like that song

creepiest b&s vocals 2 me are on full grown man bc they sound like billy joel

It may actually just be Art Department and I am feeling like this trend is more prevalent than it actually is, but definitely yeah, Art Department.

What are the good tracks on the AD album then?

"What Does It Sound Like" and "I.C.U.", to a lesser extent "Vampire Nightclub" and "Are You Living The Life".

"What Does It Sound Like" is basically ace Classic Records bumping house. I can't really imagine anyone not loving it, though it doesn't get mentioned much because everyone gets stuck on creepy vocals as the album's key talking point.

The other three all feature male vocals but they draw them back into balance with that bumping house sound rather than turning them into a lugubrious, bloated raison d'etre like "Much Too Much" (spot on song title or what) or "Tell Me Why" do.

Whereas a lot of reviews of the album seem to think that (a) "Much Too Much" is the best track on there, perhaps because they also think that (b) "the Joy Division of vocal house" is a good idea.

Basically I stand by the following from my review:

"Unfortunately, as is often the case when tunes become big off the back of their point of difference, discussions of "Without You" tend to focus on that slightly off-center vocal and the murderous bassline, understating Art Department's impeccable arrangement skills and, in particular, exacting sense of timing. Possibly Art Department (a Toronto-based duo of Glasgow and Jonny White) have listened too keenly to their own hype, as their debut album, The Drawing Board, leads off with two long-ass tunes dominated by dolorous basslines and Glasgow's morose, out-of-tune vocals. In particular, the aptly titled 10-minute-plus opener "Much Too Much" gambles that a miserablist refusal of excitement and intensity or, you know, something happening, will end up seeming evocative and atmospheric rather than half-hearted and aimless. The gamble succeeds only in part: These tracks work, but more in the sense of the listener understanding the concept rather than feeling it in their guts and hearts.

If you're someone who wants dance music to mean something, then these tracks may be the drawcard here, representing a kind of alternate reality where house vocalists like Robert Owens and Romanthony were more obsessed with the hollowness of Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter than the giddiness of Prince's 1999. And it is a great idea, but ultimately Art Department don't strike me as ideas people-- let alone songwriters-- first and foremost. They are, however, consummate arrangers, and The Drawing Board becomes immensely more involving each time the suicide tone poems take a step back and the arrangements a step forward. In terms of sheer groove, the album's easy pinnacle is "What Does It Sound Like?", whose hypnotic jacking is reminiscent of the debut albums of Motorbass and Fuckpony, each carefully sculpted component interlocking with each other in a satisfying display that Art Department can do mindless release fully as well as pent-up morbidity."

Haha I didn't like Fuckpony that much either.

Does that even refer to anything other than Art Department?

Haha maybe not. Or maybe it's a sticking point with male vocal house at the moment (really want a dub version of Forward Motion) with less Ali Love, and yeah I'm not crazy about In A Hole either. "Effete" is better than "creepy old man" though, the SECT/Ben Westbeech track from those Soul Clap mixes is lush, and I'm sure part of that comes from having heard them in a better context.

I keep meaning to get around the Deniz Kurtel album, it kinda managed to fall into the crack of my internetless couple of months and it's been way down my catchup list. My favourite house albums of this year have been Steffi, Robag Wruhme and Frivolous and they're obviously looking in a different direction entirely to the Art Department etc.

Haha I didn't like Fuckpony that much either.

O_o

Children of Love is pretty amazing FYI.

My favourite house albums of this year have been Steffi, Robag Wruhme and Frivolous and they're obviously looking in a different direction entirely to the Art Department etc.

you can probably triangulate frivolous/nicolas jaar/art department if you squint - frivolous def way out in front there though. that and tom trago are the two house albums i think are real keepers this year, above stuff which is just very good (kurtel, wruhme, jaar, steffi, audiofly) and stuff which is not that good (art department)

If you squint very hard indeed.

Matt can you listen to this please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ke1Q0hnN0

Cheers Tal for the heads-up!

hey Tim! any chance of a zip of the dancehall tracks from yr column this week?

wait, waht column??? details/link please

link? it's in local freebie papers

I'll try to organise something.

Don't worry Paul I basically cribbed it from stuff i'd already written on here/facebook about my favourite dancehall tracks of this year.