Body Language 6

March 20, 2008 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Articles, Media

Artist: JUNIOR BOYS/VARIOUS
Title: Body Language Six
Label: Get Physical Germany
Cat: GPMLP 020
Format: 2xLP
Released: 17 March, 2008
Genre: Disco/Re-Edits

Get Physical invite Canadian electro-pop duo Junior Boys to DJ the next instalment in the Body Language mix series.

Tracklist

01 Sorcerer - Surfing At Midnight (Prins Thomas Miks)
02 Supermayer - Saturndays
03 Chelonis R. Jones - Deer In The Headlights (DJ Hell Remix)
04 Love Nine – Feedback
05 Kreon & Lemos Feat. Feeboy - Fola
06 Kelley Polar - Rosenband (Magic Tim’s Instrumental Version)
07 Steadycam - In The Moog For Love
08 Radio Slave - Screaming Hands (Cosmo Vitelli Radioaktivitat Remix)
09 Studio - Life’s A Beach! (Todd Terje Beach House Mix)
10 Gui.tar - Love Started To Shine
11 Stereo Image - Dark Chapter
12 Matthew Dear - You Know What I Would Do
13 Pushé - Don’t Take Your Love Away
14 Visage - I’m Still Searching
15 Junior Boys - No Kinda Man
16 Rework - Love Love Love Yeah (Chloé Remix)
17 f0st3r - bl3w r0d30 d3m0
18 Chloé - Be Kind To Me
19 Bill Nelson - When Your Dream Of Perfect Beauty Comes True

Tags: Disco, Disco/Re-Edits, Electro, House, Junior Boys, Mix, Pop, Various

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You Belong

March 17, 2008 at 4:11 pm · Filed under Articles, Media, Reviews

Forget disco for a second. The most significant thing about the debut album from New York’s Hercules and Love Affair has less to do with revival than arrival– that of a compelling new voice in American dance music. Not Antony Hegarty’s, of Antony and the Johnsons, even though his pipes are an integral part of Hercules’ aesthetic, but Andrew Butler, a twentysomething resident of New York who has made one of 2008’s great albums, and one of the best longplayers from DFA. (DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy surely deserves some of the credit as well, as the album’s co-producer and the programmer behind most of the record’s beats.) Butler got his start writing music for art projects in college– “like a remake of Gino Soccio’s ‘Runaway’ done in the style of Kraftwerk,” he told Fact magazine– but Hercules and Love Affair’s music doesn’t require Fischerspooner-type theatrics. This debut album is a self-contained, self-assured, 10-song set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique.While more than half of the album’s tracks would easily work on forward-thinking dance floors– “Hercules’ Theme”, “You Belong”, “Athene”, “Blind”, “This Is My Love”, “Raise Me Up”, and “True False, Fake Real” all cruise comfortably between 110 and 120 bpm– what really shines is the songwriting. The album brims with hooks, choruses, bridges, strange twists, and turns.

Hercules-you belong      

Put some fire on the dancefloor! 

Tags: DFA, Disco, Hercules and Love Affair

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Safe and Sound

February 28, 2008 at 6:26 pm · Filed under Reviews

Justus Köhncke’s two previous full-lengths on Kompakt, Was Ist Musik (2002) and Doppelleben (2005), were slightly frustrating affairs. Both albums were filled with clever pop structures, quality sound design and subtle shifts in mood, but somehow they tended to fall short of pure emotional captivation. Partly of course this was due to Köhncke’s notorious vocals, which are at times just too deadpan and at times just too camp (check his destruction of Jürgen Paape’s seminal ‘So Weit Wie Noch Nie’ for the evidence, but the albums were also occasionally marred by Köhncke’s weakness for soft-focus disco, with kitsch rather than glamorous and decadent results. Safe and Sound combines many of these tendencies, but happily, it’s a much more satisfying listen. So much so you’ve got to wonder what inspired the difference. Perhaps this more muscular sound is down to Köhncke spending a lot of time in the clubs, or perhaps it’s a product of his new studio (located in an old butcher shop). The newfound help of the album’s co-writer/producer Fred Heimermann (certainly on ‘Tilda’, but likely more) might also be a contributing factor. But perhaps there was just something in the air? Those leaves on the Pop Ambient-esque cover, after all, do look suspiciously like marijuana.Köhncke’s disco tendency come to the fore on several tracks, but more confidently than on the previous two albums. With its ‘70s strings, ‘Parage’ is downright funky and would, in an ideal world, play on radios in Cadillac cars with whitewall tyres. ‘Molybdän’ lives up to its elemental name (attn non-scientists: ‘molybdenum’ is a heavy metal) and mimics more disco ball glitter than disco sound itself with sparkling stabs of sound and winding analogue washes. More overtly disco is the brilliant opener ‘Yacht’ which pays strong homage to ‘Slave to the Rhythm’, but then develops its own melodic narrative.Grace Jones isn’t the artist from the past to get name-checked. The first single from the album, ‘Feuerland’, is a cover of Krautrocker Michael Rother’s track from his 1977 LP ‘Flammende Herzen.

Tags: Ambient, Disco, Funk, Grace Jones, Justus Köhncke, Kompakt, Live, Pop, Producer, RA, Rhythm, Rock

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