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Beaucoup Fish
A stunning album of smart, dance-pop craft, Beaucoup Fish blends stomping beats and meandering, binary dream worlds into a cohesive and heavenly revelation. It's another work filled with Karl Hyde's singsong talk-vocals ("Push Downstairs") floating over DJ Darren Emerson's sinewy, house-style rave-ups ("King of Snake"), a sound that has distinguished them since 1993's Dubnobasswithmyheadman. On Beaucoup Fish , however, that sound slips around tracks that do more than patiently await the next thick coat of rhythm, building simple songs into a digitized, epic whole. There are eruptions of ecstatic melody on songs such as "Jumbo," while jerky dance tracks such as "Bruce Lee" open whole new avenues for bursting layers of rhythmic ambience. Underworld are doomed to be haunted forever by "Born Slippy" (popularized via the Trainspotting soundtrack), the world's first international rave anthem, yet Beaucoup Fish goes well beyond such timely phenomena, and works instead to free electronic music from its computer-age constraints. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Better Living Through Chemistry
Fatboy Slim (also known as Norman Cook, formally of the Housemartins) has composed a collection of tracks so dependent on samples that they'll keep "Name That Tune" fans busy for hours. The single "Going out of My Head" is crafted with funky beats thrown down on top of the guitar riff from an obscure cover of the Who's classic "I Can't Explain." Mr. Slim borrows, begs, and steals from some of the best. You'll hear obvious influences from every genre from industrial to house. But these songs do not mimic; rather, Cook takes the established and reinvents it, mixes it up, rearranges it. The result is an energized, motivating, even endearing big-beat album that feels, grooves, and moves from beginning to end. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Dreamland
A Swiss-born, Italian-raised pianist, Robert Miles serves up numbingly repetitive but lively sub-Moroder disco for 66 unrelenting minutes. While it may make Vangelis sound like Mozart by comparison on the home stereo, this is evidently sheer magic under the mirrorballs of Ibiza, Paris, and Scarborough. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Fat Of The Land
An album even the technophobic couldn't ignore, The Fat of the Land made Prodigy one of the first U.K. rave acts to infiltrate pop culture. Hard-core hip-hop-derived breakbeats, layers of unabashed (but creative) sampling, and meaningless shouted lyrics struck a chord beyond the electronic-music community. The inclusion of "Firestarter" and "Breathe" (both previously released hit singles) certainly aided the disc's widespread success, but it was the ferocity (and controversy) of "Smack My Bitch Up" that caught the world's attention. Guest Shahin Bada's Indian vocalizations convey the sense that dance music has come a long way from "Pump Up the Volume"! "Diesel Power," featuring Kool Keith, and "Funky Shit" set a wicked groove; the cover of L7's "Fuel My Fire" recalls the energy of the Sex Pistols. In fact, the dark aggression of The Fat of the Land bears closer resemblance to both rap and punk than the hedonism of techno. Leader Liam Howett simply gives up 10 solid songs with bombastic production values, transforming dance music into the art of noise. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Moon Safari
French duo Air's debut album is a superlatively happy collection of experimental disco-mood sound nestled between ambient soundscape and breathy pop. It's jazzy and melodic, and mostly laid-back, but not excessively so. There are a few shake-it, shake-it numbers, too, like the absurdly daft hit "Sexy Boy." It's snap your fingers and hang out (while reading) music or dance around sexy-slow with your mate music. It's also the perfect music to do your ironing or some other chore to; it's hypnotizing wallpaper music. It slips in and out of your consciousness, forcing you to move around with a relaxed smile before you even realize it. Oh, and contrary to sampler fashion, Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel played the instruments themselves. Bravo. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Play
The great iconoclast of techno returns with a smooth, sacred, and exhilarating record. Play's concoction of breakbeat rhythms, ambient mixology, and inspired blues and gospel samples cry out across musical genres and histories, imparting a time-tested wisdom to beat-driven ears. Moby's devout faith--in both God and his own musical whims--give this approach a sort of legitimacy that another, less sincere artist would never have. That sincerity reverberates through the beats and instrumental eclecticism like a pulse. The soulful refrains and proclamations in "Find My Baby" and "Natural Blues" somehow nestle between straight-up dance-floor rave-ups ("Bodyrock") and melt-in-your-mouth ambience ("Inside") with an effortless grace. Moby reaches across his turntables and finds something pure--almost organic. In fact, the album feels more natural than techno is ever supposed to feel, more spiritual than what DJs are supposed to be able to muster, and more alive than it has any right to be. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Something For Everybody: Baz
Luhrmann
One of the most surreal singles in memory, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" has an even stranger story than you'd imagine: in 1998, a student lifted the text of an article columnist Mary Schmich had written for the Chicago Tribune and started sending it around the world, crediting it as a commencement speech given at MIT by Kurt Vonnegut. Film director Baz Luhrmann (who had taken a big part in designing the soundscapes of his films Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) got his hands on it just as he was working on a remix of Rozalla's 1992 dance hit "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)." Within a day, Luhrmann had hired a local actor to read the text, and a single was born. It's a wonderfully surreal pop-cultural moment on an album that strives for such things. Luhrmann's modus operandi involves the remixing and customizing of tracks until they have a fabulous sheen, and it owes a lot to the equally media-attuned Malcolm McLaren (and especially to McLaren's 1989 album Waltz Darling). Though he throws in a handful of time-tested songs (Doris Day's "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps," La Bohème's "Che Gelide Manina"), Something for Everybody is very much of a specific moment--and though the moment may pass, fans will enjoy revisiting it time and again. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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Surrender
Surrender kicks off with a nervous, vibrating whine that brings to mind the first three seconds of Hendrix's "Foxy Lady." But it's just a tease; on their third album, techno's Chemical Brothers have all but turned their back on the rock muscle that earned 1997's Dig Your Own Hole gold status in the U.S. Oh, there are guest rock vocalists galore--New Order's Bernard Sumner, Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, and Oasis's Noel Gallagher--but only the latter brings out the crunching big beats that the Chems all but invented. The rest of Surrender hews closer to the thinner, synthesized textures of the electro revival that's swept the dance-music world. Much of the time that's just swell. The leadoff track, "Music: Response," is a seamless trip back to 1985, complete with vocoderized singing and Morse-code beeps. And Sumner's "Out of Control" replicates the thrill of hearing the gloomy Joy Division morph into a swell synthpop band. But without the propulsion that their trademark aggression usually provides, the Chems just barely come up with enough ideas to carry the listener all the way through an album, much less rock a dance floor for an hour at a time. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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You've Come A Long Way, Baby
[EXPLICIT LYRICS]
Norman Cook's bubble-gum techno songs--put out under a variety of guises over the years, including Pizzaman and Freak Power--are essential staples on any international dance floor. Fatboy Slim, however, is the former Housemartin's most successful incarnation, launching a Top 40 crossover hit and popular advertising jingle with last year's "Going out of My Head." You've Come a Long Way, Baby picks up where the smash single left off, cheekily pairing acidic synthesizers and drum machines with big, dumb vocal samples. It takes considerable effort sitting through an entire album of these energized tunes, but taken in small doses, songs like "The Rockafeller Skank" and "Soul Surfing" are like rays of sunshine. Click here for more information or to order this CD.
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![Fatboy Slim - You've Come A Long Way, Baby [EXPLICIT LYRICS] Cd](fatboy2.gif)
