#3494 Daft Punk - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 1997

4/5

Listen here!

Never feel totally comfortable listing mixes etc here, but this is a gudn. That flow, and extra props to those old school turntable moves, making something more out of seconds of sounds, slamming those sliders. Praise to true scientists

#3292 Fred Falke - Part IV

Perfectly-paced, thrilling, endless house//disco, right up there with the best Norwegian stuff. Delicious synths and sliding beats with space for your own memories and dreams 4/5

#3026 Giorgio Moroder - From Here to Eternity

Wildly ahead of its time, pidgeonholable as disco only because of its era. Absent context, this is techno, electro, dancepunk, or a half dozen other styles it beat to the punch. Kraftwerk's robot rock with dancefloor pacing, as proto-Daft Punk as they come. So primitive and futuristic. Perfect album title. Man those synth buzzes are thick. Brilliant 4.5/5

#3022 Sparks - No. 1 in Heaven

I can't say more sincerely how much I respect Sparks for so thoroughly selling out. Or, more generously, adopting and adapting to the latest technology. Always genre shapeshifters, always chasing the center of the music soul-body, why not get in bed with the hottest dude in the hottest style (Giorgio) and start ruttin.

On a shrinking path, tightening up, cleaning up, Sparks seemed doomed as the 70s wound down.

But Russel gets back in touch with his most falsetto-drenched lothario-struttin self, backed by relentless, writhing pulses. No 1 in Heaven's at once so true to their early bravado and riding still-cresting wave of synths and driving beats. It's them and not-them in blinding fashion, in a way that splinters what the band is. Lesser bands woulda rode their own rut to nowhere, but here's this pulsing, strange piece of new 4/5

#2925 Bobby Caldwell - What You Won't Do For Love

Pure AOR with the barest exotic touches. Stevie Wonderbread. Tonic for those who find Steely Dan just a little too spicy. But damn smooth if you're in the market for this kind of thing. In an era of synthwave and disco revival, maybe this deserves a second look. That title track at least is undeniably sweet 3.5/5

#2920 Shoping - The Official Body

Angular mutant disco, hall of mirrors retro that sounds like 4 decades at once, cathode rays stuck between stations. B-52s, Devo, Wire, Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Knife, and 100 more but somehow not enough. Love the surfy guitars, stuttering bass, sneering attitude, but there's no soul in the shell 3/5

#2789 Quincy Jones - The Dude

At its best, The Dude's funky, cool in a kind of uncool-cool 80's kind of way. Those first couple tracks show promise. But it's a producer album, slick and overpolished to death, with soppy ballads and post-disco-still-disco pop schlock padding out most of the rest. And yet, weird little exotica flourishes and some choice keys make me hedge. I can't quite dismiss this record; it's just on the knife's edge of so square its hip, a noteworthy pop nugget from another age 3/5

#2460 Evelyn "Champagne" King - Smooth Talk

King swaggers over hard-edged bass and horns, blurring the line between disco and funk. Till I Come Off the Road rivals Aretha's best, brassiest kiss-offs, and Dancin' Dancin' Dancin's a blitz of beats and hooks that does what it says on the tin. Exciting, thoroughly enjoyable stuff 4/5

#2459 Melba Moore - Melba

The upbeat disco songs are good, lush fun (Pick Me Up I'll Dance!), but countless soppy, overlong pop/soul ballads kill the momentum 3/5

#2398 Justice - Woman

Justice always sounded a step away from Daft Punk, and now they've followed them right into outright disco, even less successfully than (the wildly overrated) RAM.

The vocals are the problem: generic falsettos repeating the same generic things. They're on every track, so it's a big problem, this problem, whining over all kinds of watered-down popped bass and stringy synths. Every once in a while we get a glimpse of that muscular synth sound, uncut and uncluttered, but its way too little way too late 2.5/5

#2445 Larry Levan - Live at the Paradise Garage

The legendary, LCD-LME-namedropped scene. Pure energy, everything good about disco as it edges into funk and something even funkier. Strings in the backdrop, but crisscrossed with slashes of horns, bass, pops, blasts and irresistible exhortations to get on up. A perfectly-paced redemption of the most-assailed style around 4.5/5

#2443 Dimitri From Paris ‎– Disco Forever (The Sound Of Underground Disco)

It's a cute gimmick: a DJ mix, plus 2 discs of the full source tracks. It'd be more interesting if the mix was stronger - it's a little too cool, never quite inspiring to dance, and the source tracks fall into the same trap on a longer timeline. Solid, smooth, never quite catching fire 3.5/5

#2135 Holger Czukay - Movie

Take everything endless about Can and everything scattershot about bent-pop Zappa and here you are. Czukay's solo debut takes disco jangle and a splattering of samples and folds it all into aimless krautrock jams, a dizzying, hypnotic piece of puckish madness.

Cool in the Pool is its Frontier Psychiatrist, that one track when the adventurousness condenses into something downright hooky, but the rest is all over the place ever-boring/ever-exciting - a gem if you're in the market for something unique 3.5/5

#2090 Teddy Pendergrass - Teddy Pendergrass

Pretty but boring - the slow songs're too soppy, the fast songs're too disco-fluffed, and they're both too repetitive. Teddy's got a great voice, and sometimes his whole sexy shtick's just too much to ignore, but the songwriting's uninspired and the mix doesn't give him enough space to overcome it 2.5/5

#2080 Saint Pepsi - Hit Vibes

An album that zeros in on the dead center of the deepest groove around and rides it all night long. A blownout mix stacked with funk pops, disco beats, scrappy samples and bass bass bass, taking Daft Punk's mission to its logical analog conclusion - the blurry memory of low dark dancehalls lost in space and time, guaranteed to make whatever you're doing feel 89% cooler 4.5/5

#2076 Todd Terje & The Olsens - The Big Cover-Up

I'll bet these songs are a blast to rave out to live, but on disc there's just something missing. A lack of big moments, of contrast in the mix - it's all too smoothed out. Even the remixes are pretty safe, making the whole disc sound even more repetitive.

It's a fine listen, with some little inventions and an agreeable pulse, but it's undeniably underwhelming after It's Album Time 3/5

#2081 Black Devil Disco Club - Black Devil Disco Club

I'm uptight about scant few things, but I like me my albums-as-documents. No singles, no fucking around with mixes, no bonus tracks, no resequences, no George Lucas horseshit at all. We know the time by its artifacts and can't that be sancrofuckingsanct?

So the whole scam around this album has me rageblind. I believe for exactly zero beats that this "lost" "1978" album was "discovered" in 2004. Balloon boy, twerking girl catches fire, +1000 youtube videos of similar ilk - I have a bullshit detector that goes off seldom and is never wrong and its going off like crazy on this shit. This is exploiting our desire to go "you'll never believe this thing I found!" about something that came out in 1978, when we might just go "hey this is a pretty dope album" if it just came out in 2004.

That's what pisses me off; it got greedy. This is actually a solid album, but I'm here to hear about the music of 1978, or failing that, the music of 2004. I'm pretty sure the lesson I got was in The Music Scene of 2004: Douchebaggery Of.

Couldn't I just listen to a pretty cool, dark, minimal, DFA-esque little rumbler, mysterious and slinky and patient and strange? Full of ominous, inky energy?

But no, that just wasn't enough for yall though was it? You couldn't stand to be retro so you reconned yourself into being there on the ground floor. I call bullshit. Also fuck you with that cover art. This is hipster horseshit dumped all over the music itself. You guys are fucking traitors.

And I want to commit to this screed, but even now doubt creeps in. No Regrets, it makes me want to believe.

Maybe it's the world I hate: one where even if its not a lie, its reasonable to assume it is - because everything great is a scam, everything too good to be true -- usually is. Usually enough that, on the balance, belief is folly.

Thoroughly unsatisfied, deeply grumpy. Maybe its not 1978 or 2004 I hate, its 2016

3.5/5

#2052 VA - Mutant Disco

Disco sucks. Which makes it a useful tool for new-wavers, no-wavers, and contrarian soundmakers of all kinds, who can slingshot around disco's gravity into bad taste from behind, who can wink their way into music that's actually kind of fun.

This collection doesn't let arch/noisy pretentions get in the way of a good time - y'all can be as mutant as you want, but you gotta make the people move.

The argument seems to be that there's something good in disco, if only you could strip of its uncoolness, and the easiest way to do that is to make it even less cool and go around the horn. It mostly works, though the album as a whole falls into an uncanny middle ground: not quite easy fun, not quite artsy strange, not quite sure if its making a statement or having a laugh 3/5

#2048 James White and the Blacks - Off White

Conceptually brilliant: smashing soul, disco and no-wave nonsense into a searing, dancable // unlistenable complication, wallowing in black coolness // white uncoolness (Almost Black Part 1!)

In places it works despite itself: those grooves+beats+ladies on Contort yourself are six dozen sax screeches away from being the first dancepunk song of all time by about 30 years.

But White's admirable commitment to savaging himself and everything within arm's reach comes at the cost of....goodness? Atonal shouting, relentless sax stabs, and watertorture pacing make this a grueling, painful listen 3/5

#1928 !!! - As If

Given that dancepunk was dead just about the day it dropped, how are these guys still going?

How does this shit still sound so fresh?

The lyrics are hitchy and hooky and flecked with politik, the structures are full of little surprises - you're always on your toes, this funky alien thing writhing around you and around you and in its own way its a damn fine dancer.

Also, I don't call out individual tracks very often, but goddamn Freedom '15's one of the banginest things I've heard in ages - the huge bass, the slinky verses, that euphoric chorus calling upon the best of Stax fuck-you songs, and then the cracking second half that snaps the whole thing 90 degrees, degree by degree till you're in a whole 'nother headspace. That bass.

This makes me want to be in an actual dancing club. I never go to dancing clubs. Cool rave song.

4.5/5