The New Oldskool Electronica
August 24th, 2006
I’m obsessed with music. Have been since I was but a larva raiding my mom’s lounge-a-riffic collection of 8-tracks and vinyl LPs (The Carpenters, The Bee Gees, Engelbert Freakin’ Humperdink, and - best of all! - Don Ho)….Thanks to Solid Gold, I discovered disco. MTV led me to New Wave. WMBS, Uniontown’s very own AM radio station (and the only radio station my mother could ever pick up in her car) gave me oldies and polkas. And my redneck neighbors’ all-night parties and boomboxes introduced me to classic rock, heavy metal, and both oldskool country and oldskool rap (they were fairly eclectic, too, in their own weird li’l beer-and-coke-soaked sort of ways). All of this early exposure to so many different forms of music prettymuch programmed me to be a total Record Nerd…a fact amply demonstrated by my present collection of >1800 CDs, and nearly 80,000 mp3s. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.
But my problem is, sometimes, a benefit to others - because not only do I like to listen to a butt-load of music, I like to write about it, too! So, a number of friends have convinced me that it’s high time I start adding some music reviews to this good ol’ vanity-press I call Pegritz.com for the amusement, delectation, and - possibly - even edification of The Masses (and my friends, who generally come to me for suggestions on funk-ay new jams to seek out). So here we go, peeps: the hot, seXXXy, inaugural edition of Pegritz.com’s brand new record reviews feature: Listen To This If You Know What’s Good For You!
(Don’t worry, folks: I know a number of you go to Pitchfork Media for the scoop on Neue Muzik….You’ll find just as much pretentious babble, arcane music-nerd terms, and snobbish attitude here as you do there - except the music I thrust under your nose for consideration is Unconditionally Guaranteed by Pegritz.com to be GOOD or triple your money back.)
So, let’s begin. This week, we’re all about the contemporary rebirth of electrofunk.
To start with, I’ve been seriously grooving on this new collection I got the other day: Erotic Lounge 4 - Bare Jewels. Terrible name for a comp, I know: it sounds like it should be the latest direct-to-video release by Zalman King–and the cover art’s pretty godawful, too (even though, surprisingly enough, it does not feature Shannon Tweed)…but a better collection of slow, slinky, downtempo electronica, funk, and jazz you will NOT find this year. “Lounge” collections are generally pretty eclectic, I’ve discovered, usually mixing tracks that represent house, jazz, lo-fi, funk, etc. into a chilly melange of laidback sounds - and this particular lounge collection is just as eclectic, which means it’s definitely NOT a boring collection of homogenous music. Some of the tracks do partake, more of less, of the booty jam genre - “Europhone” by Pluto Project, for example, is a surprisingly explicit phone-sex joint that could be incredibly silly except that it has a HUMPIN’ beat and a wonderful sax solo - but for the most part, what this CD represents is everything from funky bedroom jazz (Sade’s “Lovers Rock”) to straightforward electropop (”Sink” by Tanga).
I particularly recommend The Strike Boys’ “Playtime Theme,” which - check this out - would TOTALLY be the theme song for Foxy Brown if Foxy Brown had been set in the Year 2132 and Foxy’s main nemesis had been a posthuman streetwalker whose afro was a Moravec bush robot capable of dismantling johns into their component atoms and building ray-guns out of them. I shit thee not! If you like electrofunk, get this collection, strip down to your “Home of the Whopper” boxers, and let the synths pound.
Next, we’ve got MSTRKRFT’s debut album, The Looks. It’s…like, someone took Daft Punk and Out Hud and squished them together into an electronic dance outfit that is both surprisingly human yet still 100% robotic. A cyborg electrofunk outfit, and heretofore I’d been fairly impressed by their work remixing the likes of Bloc Party and Death From Above 1979 (whose keyboardist is, in fact, 50% of MSTRKRFT) - but what would an album of orignial pieces soung like, I wondered? Simply put, THIS IS A BAND OF TERMINATORS, and they have come to terminate the reign of shitty music on the world’s dancefloors in order to make the future safe for SKY_NET! None of the arrangements here are particularly creative, mind-blowing, or intricate - in fact, most of the songs are pretty basic house tracks with a distinct dance-punk influence (think The Rapture being remixed by Radio 4 back when Radio 4 were a good band instead of just another bland indie-rock outfit) - but, damn, the songs are just so much fun, so bouncy, and so robotic that it’s nearly impossible to stop listening to them long enough to realize how simple they are. The lead track, “Work On You”, is a basic beat/bassline/vocoded-vocal-line confection that defines the Funkay Terminator sound perfectly and should keep your booty busy for hours at a time! Great driving music, too.
And now: Cassius - 15 Again. You know, this album really does make me feel 15 again, because it sounds like it should’ve come out in 1988…but not the 1988 we knew. Instead, imagine a spaceship full of aliens sent to our planet specifically to study the Funk & Disco Era of the 1970s crashing near Paris around, say, 1982 and then trading all of their advanced production techniques and synthesizer technology to the Frenchies in return for a neverending supply of Parisian hookers. By 1988, the technology would’ve been fully understood and Cassius would’ve been able to put out 15 Again in Actual 1988 instead of Virtual 1988 (that is, 2006). I remember when I heard Cassius’ first album waaaaay back in…Idaknow, 1998 or so: it was very bland, run-of-the-mill late-90’s electronica. The kind of unremarkable crap that MTV’s Amp show used to play. Cassius since then has said, “Man, funk dat!” and, taking a cue from Sagat, asked themselves “Why is it that electronic music has to be repetitive and completely soul-less and boring?” This album is 12 straight tracks of robotified electrofunk make entirely by AIs built by Funkatech Incorporated, Makers of Funky Things to Play With. It’s fun, it’s very groovy and danceable, it’s surprisingly twitchy with a major IDM influence in some places (especially on “This Song”, whose tail end literally disintegrates into an awesome murk of synth-noodling and weird breaks), and yet, it’s still a very straightforward pop-electronic album. “ Worth a listen, especially if you believe that one day Humanity will create a machine capable of getting up on the downstroke.
OK, and finally, Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio. STUPID name for an album, but what a damn good album! The story with Basement Jaxx is the same as with Cassius: their earlier stuff didn’t impress me one bit, but with this album, they somehow figured out the exact frequencies and beats per minute that create sympathetic vibrations in my funk bone. “Take Me Back To Your House” is an absolutely BITCHIN’ club track that sounds like a house remix of oldskool En Vogue…only with a banjo solo. Yeah, you heard me. Not since The Grid’s magnificent “Swamp Thing” or the entire soundtrack of O, Brother, Where Art Thou? has a banjo hit me so squarely in the gluteus maximus. This is a VERY diverse album–even more diverse than the aforementioned Cassius joint. “Hey You” is an INCREDIBLE track with a Turkish/Indian flair that sounds like “Hindi Sad Diamonds” (from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack) remixed by Panjabi MC. We’re talking a jam so sweet it could make even Kali and Muhammud dance together! Best of all: it’s almost entirely live instruments - a surprising move for a band mostly defined by its synths. The Force is strong with this track. But then you got the swanky, jazzy “On the Train” and the M.I.A.-wannabe track “Run 4 Cover”…soon followed up by the sublime “Smoke Bubbles,” a slow retro R&B track that sounds like Beck produced by Jimmy Jam, with Fiona Apple on vocals (actually, it’s not Fiona Apple, but some chick who sounds a bit like her). The album is solid, diverse, and superbly produced. Just get it and thank me later.
And that’s about it for this week’s installment, folks. Next week, I’ll be tossing some fresh new New Wave jams your way, so be sure to do something weird with your hair (Elmer’s Glue makes a great styling agent), break out the mod suits, and the skinny ties!
Before I go, though, I must give a shout-out to my boy aRvin Clay over at Radio2019, one of the smartest new music blogs on the ‘Net. You owe me one for Khoiba, son!
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