We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Detached from the goofy Renaissance Faire quality themes of post-industrial neo-classical music, the prolific producer marks a drastic, though lackluster, departure from his typically rhythmic past. Devoid of danceability, its transuding caliginosity faux-menaces like a murky slime creeping towards an unsuspecting idyll at sundown.
For over ten years, Hymen has made its stubborn mark on the landscape of electronic music. Initially a rough riding offshoot for Ant-Zen's more accessible acts, it morphed from moody malcontent into a more diverse champion of IDM's late bloomers, such as Kattoo, Keef Baker, and Tonikom. Another of these belated upstarts, Ben Lukas Boysen, has previously recorded three such albums for the self-proclaimed technoid imprint since 2004, all under the moniker Hecq. With this, his fourth for Hymen and sixth overall, the producer tossed his drum machines overboard and set a course for dark waters tread (and retread) by the Cold Meat Industry roster.
Boysen has evidently taken pains to craft a bleak soundtrack to a nonexistent drama, yet as with so many actual film scores, detachment from visual cues and pivotal plot points leaves the unfamiliar listener to judge the music on its own. In the case of Night Falls, such analysis is to its detriment. Unlike labelmate Lusine Icl's surreptiously melancholic Language Barrier, which ought to have resuscitated people's interest in purified ambient music, Night Falls is understated to a fault, its bland latter half rampant with elongated tone worship that neither shatters templates nor effectively challenges today's dominant dronesmiths. Practically seamless transitions between tracks frequently fail to excite. The unimaginative vocal surges on "Red Sky" that break up the preceding, pervasive monotony pale in comparison to Attila Csihar's fiendish guttural collaborations with Stephen O'Malley.
Despite its wishful beginnings and triumphant closer, the bombastic tearjerking "I Am You," Night Falls suffers from such an inexplicably prolonged slump that no ham-fisted orchestration can save this pretentious mess. Had Boysen sought simply to write background music for downtrodden goths and other such mopes to passively absorb while sulking through Second Life, this album might be considered a success. Yet it is clear that he sought more from this venture, a new direction for Hecq or a possible ascendancy to the rank of "composer." While this weak first attempt shouldn't entirely dissuade Boysen from pursuing further beatless journeys, he is no Graeme Revell.
Western Europe has arguably had great influence over electronic music these last few years, with rebellious artists like Justice and Boys Noize legitimizing gritty, harsher sonics in stark contrast to the overexposed slickness of meathead-friendly dance. That trend makes this Spanish duo's latest all the more maddening and highlights the stultifying insulation of the current generation of industrial musicians.
Miss Kittin probably had the right idea pitching Batbox, her recent self-released long-player, as a goth album, all things considered. Knowing that nobody keeping pace with what's dominating forward-thinking dancefloors on both sides of the the Atlantic could stomach something so regressive, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that only the hopelessly coddled black-clad masses could possibly stomach it. A trip to any city's local goth and/or industrial party will likely reveal an audience enjoying songs that would have seemed a bit stale to just about anyone else ages ago. Particularly noxious is the more clubby fare, ranging from plodding dark trance with indistinguishable cookie monster vocals to oversimplified disco noise. While the latter category has produced a handful of worthy acts, the bulk of new music likely to be played to these half-empty venues hardly warrants the limited attention it receives.
Referencing happy hardcore, electroclash, and jungle, three more completely stagnant subgenres, Turn It On numbs the mind with its incessant regurgitation. Having barely progressed from a four-album tenure with Hands Productions, Proyecto Mirage operates as if stranded on a desert island since 2000. Fast-paced cuts like "Cermol" and "Piano Song" recall Hypnoskull, a far worthier though equally stunted Ant-Zen artist, while the more sluggish "Salvation" marches to the same beat as early Covenant or even Front 242. The machine clatter and bleep of "Darker Bex," the sole attempt to shake things up, lacks the spirit of its forebear, Speedy J, who nailed this style with A Shocking Hobby eight years ago.
The vocal numbers feature laughably trite lyrics that I want to chalk up to the language barrier. (I suppose if I tried to write songs in something other than my native tongue that I'd come across similarly mockable.) With a dated melodic hook that pilfers from Zombie Nation circa 1999, "Cannibal Party" has the duo's better half, Alicia Willen, absentmindedly mumbling hackneyed phrases with a trace of punk attitude. Despite implied affection towards Esplendor Geometrico and assumed appreciation for DAF, Proyecto Mirage appears aloof, altogether unaware of what made those pioneering projects so novel. Only a scene as retrograde and underwhelming as industrial could nurture a band like this for so long without expecting or demanding more.
Faust's Jean-Herve Peron joins Andrew Liles for an album full of childlike joy. From the electric colours of the sleeve to the electric performances on the disc, this is a wonderful way to spend three quarters of an hour. Both artists sound like they are having fun and the cheer definitely filters through.
This is a fitting sister album to the Faust and Nurse With Wound collaboration Disconnected. There is a more playful vibe to Fini!, from Peron's lyrics (although some of it sounds like idle studio talk removed from its original context; "Is this Kate Bush?") to Liles' disorientating arrangements. Taken together, the 14 tracks that make up this album are as varied as anything dotted throughout the Faust or Andrew Liles back catalogues but all the songs sound like they belong together. There is the kraut stomp of "The Drummer is on Valium" and the philosophical "I Have Lost Faith in Words;" both similar in spirit but very different in execution.
The majority of the pieces here are on the shorter side of things, ranging from 40 seconds to a couple of minutes in most cases. Sometimes I feel like they have been stopped far too early, ideas that could go further are stopped short but it never feels like I have been short-changed. Tracks like "Congo Bongo La La La" might well deserve to be longer but they still pack the punch that you want and realistically, there is only so many long songs an artist can do in their careers before they need to shake things up a bit (and both Liles and Peron are no stranger to long songs).
Not that it is all little snippets of sound, there are some meatier pieces on the CD. The twisted Middle Eastern music by way of Wümme in "Shake Your Hooves" is very satisfying. For five glorious minutes, a fuzzed out bass guitar propels the track along like a runaway horse. It is the perfect length, not outstaying its welcome but sticking around long enough to sink your teeth into. However, things get even better with "It's Too Loud" as Peron appears in both stereo channels in various languages while a Velvet Underground style guitar rhythm builds up in the background. If VU kicked Lou Reed out of the band and hired Peron in his stead then "Sister Ray" would probably have started like this.
Considering Liles has played live as part of Faust and there is at least one planned performance of Fini! later this year, I dearly hope he continues to work with Peron either in or out of Faust. This album is full of superb moments and it would be a shame if this was to be the only release by the duo.
Partly based on an old Swedish folktale, Pyrrhula ("Doomlord") is a pitch black journey into utter darkness. This is a tale of foreboding doom... a portent of dark times to come... a blight on the face of this earth. These eight Black Ambient / Doom / Droneworks were brought forth from the abyss of Villa Bohult exclusively for Cold Spring and contain the malevolent vocals of Lord Nordvargr himself!
"Beware the small creatures of light, they only bring misery and death upon the enlightened ones. For they will paint their breast with blood and reap your unborn angels".
Special limited edition of 100 copies also available - comes with exclusive Nordvargr black and silver embroidered patch. Only available directly from Cold Spring!
Alex Tiuniaev is an electronic musician and producer from Moscow, Russia. 'I Knew Her' is a 40-minute long journey of heart-melting, melancholic and neo-symphonic splendour - full of choirs, strings and neoclassical orchestration. This solitary track builds to a haunting and breathtaking crescendo... then brings the listener gently back down to the warm earth. A truly monumental release, with influences ranging from Sigur Rós to Philip Glass and Stars Of The Lid.
While it almost seems more of an experiment than a true composition at times, this 140 minute work shows the clown prince of minimalist drone working on live improvisations using a unique instrument, a double piano. And while sounding purely experimental at times, the work transcends the academics and is just as enjoyable to listen to as a work of art as it is a study of an instrument.
It comes as no surprise at all that this collaboration between Sunn O))) and Goatsnake's Greg Anderson and Gentry Densley from Iceburn is black and metallic. I think anyone would be completely floored if it were to be too insane of a departure from either artist's day jobs, and the influence of their main projects definitely shows through. But, aided and abetted by a slew of collaborators, Ascend has a style and character all its own, even with the obvious lineage from the participants, it is a very interesting work that stands on its own.
Anyone who sees Sunn O))) connected with an album expects some level of bowel churning sub-bass drone and Ample Fire Within is no exception. The opening rumbles of "The Obelisk of Kolob" cements this fact with the lugubrious low frequency guitar that opens it. However, the differences start to become more obvious when the slow, entrenched in swampy mud percussion section starts and the sounds become increasingly complex and layered, ending in a much more structured way than it began. The drone is representing on "V.O.G." as well, but lurking beneath slow martial percussion and what sounds like a dying bagpipe. This sludge metal take on William Wallace's marching music is later augmented with some sickly, anemic guitar soloing from Kim Thayil (yes, from Soundgarden) and Densely's restrained, focused vocals.
Gentry Densely's vocals appear on most of the tracks here, but differ greatly in style and technique. The jazz influenced guitar that opens and closes the title track are matched with more overtly "metal" vocals, sort of Cookie Monster style, but layered and processed enough to make them a different beast entirely. On "Divine" he channels a more angry, slightly less gruff version of Tom Waits that make an excellent match with more open, expansive sound that resembles current day Earth's melodic country/gospel drone played with the intensity of old school Sunn O))).
The closer, "Dark Matter," is perhaps the most experimental here, opening with a deep organ pastiche and distant, echo-y vocals that become more prominant as the mix gets thicker with raw guitar soloing, trombone (from Sunn/Earth collaborator Steve Moore) and eventually the slow, La Brea Tar Pits drumming from earlier. Again, there is another track, "Her Horse Is Thunder," that I didn't have a chance to hear thanks to Southern Lord's policy on promos, which I discussed at length in my review of Boris' Smile a few weeks ago, so I shan't reiterate here.
A lot of the promotion for this album has linked it from the fusion jazz of later Miles Davis to the slow grime of The Melvins, and while that's not immediately apparent on listening, it is definitely there in the more open experimentation and odd structures of the tracks which differ from both primary artists' usual projects. Greg Anderson isn't trying to throw down his best John McLaughin impression, but that vibe is still there. For those who find Sunn O))) and the like a bit too dull and monotonous, this is definitely more accessible and varied, though it lacks that full on subsonic warfare elements that stuff like White1 did so well.
Our new, semi-regular feature of notable new dance singles continues with reviews of The Juan Maclean, Audion, Kelley Polar, Low Motion Disco, Goldfrapp and Ricardo Villalobos.
Summer is upon us again, and just as the multiplexes are being crammed full of big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster action films, so the stacks at your local 12" vinyl vendor are being stuffed full of big, dumb floor-fillers. This is not a bad thing at all, as even with climate change in full swing, summer is still the time for outdoor raves, tent parties, festivals, and destination clubs in tropical climes. With that in mind, here is a small selection dance singles that might be making the summer even hotter.
What a DJ needs for huge, mixed summer crowds are cuts with massive crossover appeal, and this long-awaited new 12" by The Juan Maclean more than fits the bill. From the beginning, the DFA label made its name on club music with a broad-based appeal, getting the normally stoic hipsters and indie rock kids to embrace disco and house music, as well as winning over many veterans of the dance scene. As far as I'm concerned, The Juan Maclean is the DFA's flagship act, consistently turning out stunning singles and remixes that bring a punk irreverance to classic electro, house and disco music that feels the truest to DFA's implicit mission statement. Juan's background as a member of rock bands has kept his compositions from going too far into the glittery oblivion, even on a single like "Happy House," a piano-led chunk of epic diva house that pulls a dynamic rabbit out of its hat about eight minutes into its 12-plus-minute running time. The track, especially the piano loop and rhythm section, bears more than a passing resemblance to Dubtribe Soundsystem's "Do It Now," a deep house floor-filler from Ibiza circa 2001. It's not clear whether it's a sample or an homage, but Juan Maclean's track is different enough—with its eclectic rhythm section, full female vocals by the awesome Nancy Whang, and penultimate "launch me into space" coda—that no one will be accusing Juan of plagiarism. Those worried that the title of this single indicates a capitulation to the best-forgotten 1990s "happy hardcore" style need not fear, as the title is actually a pun from the lyrics: "You brought me home to this happy house / You're the reason for the width of my smile." The track is pure crowd-pleasing ear candy: bongos, handclaps, cowbell and funky syncopated bass; and just in case you don't like house music, the track radically shift into cosmic, Giorgio Morodor-esque italodisco territory by the end. It's at least three different songs crammed into one epic side. The Prince Language Dub Mix is exactly what its name promises, a mellow reinterpolation of the track which loses the dynamics and eclecticism of the original, but gains sophistication and complexity. Lee Douglas' remix attempts a marriage of the track's various sections with some success, producing an infectious and hard-hitting track that may rival the original for DJ exposure in the coming months.
Matthew Dear's Asa Breed was my favorite album of last year, an unorthodox record that synthesized Dear's background in techno with his emerging pop tendencies, revealing hidden resonances between the two, and in the process creating an alternative historical track for both acid techno and electronic pop. However, as the music produced under his own name becomes increasingly focused on this techno-pop hybrid, it has been necessary for Dear's more minimalistic, purist, club music sensibilities to find their expression under the project names Audion, Jabberjaw and False. Of these three projects, the most consistently rewarding has been Audion, with a backlog of releases that redefine minimal techno for the coming aeon of noise, slamming together buzzsaw synths and gritty, mud-splattered rhythms for music that is textural, hard-edged and unbelievably infectious. "Billy Says Go" is no exception, all resonant thrumming kicks and crisp snares, joined by a dusty, off-kilter hand-played trebly synth. The effect is dark, hedonistic and weird-as-fuck, the perfect track for a 2:00 AM drop when all the drugs have kicked in and the floor is in danger of showing fatigue. "Snap Into It" is even darker, reformulating industrial music using the audio lexicon of techno, simultaneously soothing and sadistic, like the soft spoken leatherdaddy who ushers you into his sex sling with gentle, whispering persuasion. "Against All Odds" isn't quite as breathless as the first two tracks, although it does feature some stunning alien synth textures and coronas of ear-massaging static that push the track far past the neutral zone into the empty vacuum of deep space. Fans of experimental, industrial and noise music who scoff at the populist tendencies of techno would do well to discover the work of Matthew Dear. I won't say that there is a method to his madness, but there is certainly a madness in his method.
This single was actually released last year, so it hardly qualifies as "of the moment" in a genre that reinvents intself every two weeks, but I think it deserves some attention, especially following the recent release of Kelley Polar's full length album I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling. The full-length album is a masterpiece of high musical melodrama. Produced by the awesome Morgan Geist, I Need You is an extravagant, baroque concoction of disco, house and Arthur Russell-style classical flourishes, all permeated with mystical underpinnings that combine references to Greek mythology with esoteric musings on physics and the mind/body ontological split. Containing the two best album cuts with a fantastic remix, this 12" is a great way to gain access into the world of Kelley Polar without navigating the deep conceptual whirlpools and spiral jetties of the full-length album. "Chrysanthemum" chops up closely mic'd breathing, adds a plainly synthetic snare, before opening out into a full, resplendent synthscape, with Polar's vocals singing lyrics at once sensual and deeply fucked-up: "Make a chrysanthemum / of every human head / make a chrysanthemum / and kill them in their beds." It's indulgent in every possible way, and that's what I like about it. You have to respect an artist like Polar, a Juilliard-trained violinist, who leaps headfirst into dance music, taking the risk of producing something that might be mistaken for high camp in its unrestrained gorgeousness. "Rosenband" is more electropop than electro-disco (until the string quartet stabs come in at the chorus), and once again features lyrics that aestheticize murder at a Sophoclean pitch. Magic Tim's remix of "Rosenband" finishes out the single, creating a believable and eminently spinnable instrumental version of the song that would make it the perfect segue between a Metro Area cut and a Hercules and Love Affair track.
Low Motion Disco, "Love Love Love" Parts 1 & 2 Eskimo
Low Motion Disco is a new act on Eskimo Records, aiming for slightly lower-BPM excursions into high-tech disco music. Everything about the music is pure cliche, from the stereo-panned bongos to the repeating piano figures, but this is an advantage for this kind of music. Although it's hard to point to any elements of "Love Love Love" that I haven't heard a thousand times before, something about it just hits right, and the execution is spot on. From reading about this project, I was hoping for something a bit more primitive and loose, like the late-period disco-fied Can. However, that's not quite what we get here, and the effect of the slowness is simply to focus the listener in on the details of the groove, the full spectrum of each synthesizer stab, the resonating corridors of reverb and space echo. The real treat of these two 12" vinyl singles, however, are the remixes. The best is by new DFA signing Still Going, who change the song so much it is hardly recognizable, adding a 303-style acid bassline entirely absent from the original, and compounding layers of audio sediment to give the track an epic hugeness that sounds positively revelatory at high volumes. I nearly shit myself when the awesome guitar vamps came in at the six-minute mark. Holy fuck. Though Still Going have definitely created the floor-filler among the remixes, LSB's more faithful, uptempo take is no slouch either. Aeroplane's take is a contender as well, emphasizing the melodies and creating a Daft Punk-style tent-burner that is sure to get some asses moving. The only remix that doesn't work for me is the Soft Rocks remix, which adds the vocals of Kathy Diamond, but fails to add any intrigue whatsoever to the groove. I think we're going to be hearing a lot more from Low Motion Disco, especially after these remixes get passed through the crucible of summer DJ sets.
I should declare at the outset that I have never really warmed up to Goldfrapp. Ever since the music underwent a drastic transformation from the cinematic, Portishead-lite of Felt Mountain into the sleek, throbbing electro-disco of Black Cherry and Supernature, I've had Alison Goldfrapp and co. pegged as bandwagon-jumpers, and the music, while often more than competent, hasn't convinced me to think otherwise. However, she has always had remarkable taste in collaborators and remixers. The list of artists she has recruited to remix her tracks is breathtaking: Mantronix, Ewan Pearson, T. Raumschmiere, Benny Benassi, Jacques Lu Cont, Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, Phones, Tiefschwarz, the DFA, Carl Craig, The Flaming Lips, and recently, Hercules and Love Affair. Her new single from the Seventh Tree album is "Happiness," and in a typically incomprehensible Mute Records attempt to confuse the marketplace, there are at least six different versions of maxi CD singles, promos and limited 7 inches already out or on the way, each containing a slightly different set of remixes. The one I've got features a remix of "Happiness" by the awesome Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve (whose last release I reviewed here), a version of "Monster Love" credited as "Goldfrapp vs. Spiritualized," and a Yeasayer remix of "Eat Yourself." The BTWS remix is, not surprisingly, the standout here; a psychedelic reimagining of the original, emphasizing vintage organ sounds, backwards tracking and lysergic phasing. I'm consistently impressed by what Erol Alkan and Richard Norris accomplish with their remixes, being faithful to the originals while introducing a chaotic element that makes everything sound unstuck in time. "Monster Love" finds J. Spacemen turnign Goldfrapp's track into, for all intents and purposes, a Spiritualized song. That means zero dancefloor potential, I'm afraid. The same with Yeasayer's remix, which steals some loops from the original and creates a fun little piece with no groove, and a running time of 2:25. So, the winner here by a landslide is BTWS, whose style is so unique as to be instantly recognizable, even when remixing an artist as far afield as Goldfrapp.
I've been totally underwhelmed by minimal house in all its iterations. Although I have occasionally heard a track such as Ricardo Villalobos' "Easy Lee" and found it quite appealing, I find long DJ sets of this sort of thing deadly. Villalobos' mega-hyped installment in the Fabric series was released recently to near-total acclaim, which I felt was incomprehensible, given that Villalobos broke the rules of a DJ mix by playing nearly exclusively his own music, and boring music at that. Now comes "Enfants," which got a lot of pre-release hype by bloggers like Philip Sherburne who never tire of enthusing over merely competent music. Though "Enfants" clearly works as a DJ tool (more on that later), I see it as the absolute creative nadir of minimalism as a dance genre. Villalobos gives us 17 minutes of a four note piano loop, a caveman-simple rhythm, and a choir of children chanting repetitively in some mysterious language. No development, no melodies, no transitions, not even a goddamned kick drum for fuck's sake! Add to this insult the fact that the piano riff is lifted from Nina Simone's "Sinnerman," and the chanting is taken directly from Christian Vander's 1995 work Baba Yaga La Sorciere, a version of Magma's seminal album Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh rearranged for a children's chorus (I guess that makes the language Kobaian). To be fair, Villalobos does admit that his track is "based on" Vander's piece, but he doesn't make it clear that it is a direct, unreworked sample, or that his piano loop bears more than a passing resemblance to a very familiar Nina Simone song. I will say that this single does work as a DJ tool, as it can be easily mixed with something else heavy on low-end, bassline and kick drums, and in that context I could imagine it being very effective. However, Villalobos isn't supposed to be producing DJ tools and loop records, he's supposed to be producing dance music. I'm afraid this doesn't qualify. The less said about the B-side, the better.
It is difficult to judge a soundtrack when listening to it in isolation from the movie it is meant to accompany. This album, roughly half and half the work of Jason Pierce (under his J. Spaceman pseudonym) and the Sun City Girls, is enjoyable by its own merits but unfortunately has moments where the music sounds incomplete, the necessary images absent.
Pierce's contributions are mostly a far cry from his style of song writing in Spiritualized (and millions of light years away from Spacemen 3). Instead of the lush and powerful arrangements of his main breadwinning enterprise, the pieces here range from simple musical sketches, usually brief but enjoyable, to strange mood setters, like "Stooges Harmonica," that do not have enough oomph in them to stand on their own without the movie to go with them. Occasionally the melodic style that characterises Pierce's work in Spiritualized appears in unusual contexts such as the pastoral strings of "Garden Walk." However, the psychedelic overload that draws me to Pierce's music is absent. It is not a bad thing by any means; it shows another side to an already impressive artist.
Pierce is not the only one breaking away from his usual modus operandi; the Sun City Girls' pieces are quite different from what I normally encounter from them (but granted I'm not a massive collector of their work). The gentle, hushed air of "3D Girls" sits in between some of Pierce's best and least impressive pieces; here the Sun City Girls sound like they might overpower whatever scene is on the screen at that time. The highlight of the album comes with their rendition of the song "Lonely," the viola-led arrangement is a bittersweet take on the often schmaltzy classic. The album's closer, "Farewell," is another beautiful piece that not only works as music for the end of a film but also as a poignant goodbye to Charles Gocher.
The soundtrack to Mister Lonely is not an essential purchase for devotees of either Pierce or the Sun City Girls although it is unlikely that anyone would be totally disappointed with it. I could do without the chunks of dialogue dotted throughout the disc (even if one of them is recited by Werner Herzog). Aside from these, which in fairness only add up to a small fraction of the total run time, and the odd dull track, this is a bit of an oddity but it is at the least an enjoyable oddity.
Afrobeat has always been too far eclectic for simple classification, destined to confound those who prefer their music neatly categorized into genre buckets. That special quality makes this compilation of previously vinyl-only remixes and reinterpretations of recent material from the renowned percussionist all the more fitting.
Hailed for his work with Fela Kuti's Africa 70 as well as his first trio of solo albums, Tony Allen may actually have been more important than even the late frontman, as his inspired, inventive style of playing all-but defined Afrobeat, something that none of the surviving Kuti clan can claim despite their continued commitment to preserving Fela's legacy. In recent years, the ubiquitous Damon Albarn has brought Allen to all new audiences as part of the unlikely supergroup The Good, The Bad and The Queen, as well as a full length album and subsequent 12” records released through the Honest Jon's label, several of which are compiled here. As made clear with Lagos Shake, Allen's admirers are hardly limited to Britpop royalty. Here, a diverse group of artists grab hold of his 2006 full-length Lagos No Shaking, adding elements of this contemporary work to their own. As should be expected, some rely heavily on the source material while others choose to sprinkle choice bits of Allen into their contributions. Still, whether it be the lively jazz on Salah Ragab's take on “Ole” or the Bonde Do Role's snapping carioca electrofunk reshape of “Awa Na Re” the music splendidly revels in its freedom and hardly ever loses momentum.
Unlike so many remix discs, no one style dominates Lagos Shake. Honest Jon's labelmates Wareika Hill Sounds present a tribal luminosity on “Reggae Land Dub” while indie producers like Diplo and Newham Generals mold Allen's originals into subversive clubwise cut-up fare and (thankfully) instrumental South London grime, respectively. Both halves of the Basic Channel / Rhythm and Sound partnership take a crack at transforming Allen for the dancefloor. Mark Ernestus lays down a disco dub that's as starkly minimal as it is silky and smooth. Superior to this fine cut is Moritz von Oswald's ten-minute long mix of “Ole,” a sonic odyssey that starts with a steel drum performance in the echo chamber that steadily climbs into transcendent Sunday afternoon house adorned with wistful pads and snippets of Rolling Dollar’s voice.
Yet perhaps the real show stealer comes from techno icon Carl Craig, who remixes “Kilode” into a positively exuberant blend of Detroit-friendly stabs, diva-quality vocals, and broken breakbeats. Though discerning DJs already have this killer in their crate, the CD release offers a potentially greater audience for such a warm track. Lagos Shake hits all the right notes for the coming summer season.
Scan the obsessive posts on the handful of dedicated roots reggae forums online and the name Bunny "Striker" Lee will inevitable crop up—and rightly so. Focusing solely on his productions between 1973 and 1979, this compilation may not be even remotely exhaustive, but it provides a worthwhile if slightly forgettable gateway into the influential producer's sizeable body of work.
Boasting contributions from big names such as Horace Andy and Delroy Wilson alongside buried treasures from lesser-known singers, The Mighty Striker Shoots At Hits pays tribute to one of the few surviving producers from the most celebrated generation of Jamaican music. A sequel, more or less, to the Moll-Selekta label's 2005 release The Bunny Lee Rocksteady Years, this new set exemplifies that pivotal time where Rastafarian lyrics themes increasingly replaced the more conventional subjects that preceded them in ska and rocksteady. The title, packaging and design all nod to Lee’s affinity for Westerns, and, while I’m certain that these tracks feature session players recognizable to fans of this exciting decade in reggae music, the liner notes inexplicably decline to acknowledge them in favor of brief, unnecessary biographies of Lee and the singers.
Dismayingly, the collection largely skimps on lengthy showcases in favor of far shorter 7" sides, especially considering his noteworthy involvement with dub pioneer King Tubby, a frequent engineer and collaborator on his sessions. Some fortunate exceptions to this are the robust extended mix of Leroy Smart's "Love In My Heart" and the aforementioned Andy's "I Don't Want To Be Left Outside," his captivating voice bouncing off the studio walls thanks to an inspired, heavenly usage of echo effects. Still, perhaps the biggest fault of The Mighty Striker Shoots At Hits is the mysterious exclusion of his DJ productions of the period. With only a single cut featuring toaster Prince Ras Murray included here, this vital portion of the man's career seems woefully overlooked. Hopefully another volume that highlights these works will follow this one.
Still, there's plenty of good to go with the bad here. Hortense Ellis, sister of the sensational Alton Ellis, covers her sibling's legendary hit "I'm Still In Love" masterfully and memorably in a lover's rock style, perhaps dwarfing the original in the eyes of many collectors. While the now apparently defunct Blood And Fire imprint gave part of Johnny Clarke's collaborative with Lee discography some decent treatment with the CD release of Dreader Dread 1976-1978 roughly a decade ago, the two tracks featured here ("Peace And Love In The Ghetto," "Rockers For Me") did not appear on that set and thus should appeal to collectors and completists. Overall, though, there’s just not enough striking material from the Striker to make this an essential purchase.