Welcome to part one of Beatz By The Pound’s year-end roundup for 2007, containing the staff’s favorite dance singles, albums, mixes, producers, and labels of the year.

(more…)

Wherein I talk about the Aeroplane remix of this song that I heard on the October 9 edition of Beats In Space, guest-mixed by New York’s Runaway dudes. Pillowtalk: The Sequel is my initial thought, as the track begins with a patient thump, some amorphous misty synths, and a tambourine mixed to shame that Jet song that sounds like Iggy Pop (the only good thing Jet has ever done was that tambourine part). Except this “Sequel” is so much wetter, especially when the piano chords drop.

I hear this and rush to tell my post-Stylus BBTP buds how genuinely psyched I am that somebody picked up on the Quiet Village soft-focus Balearic vibe, ever since QV dropped off significantly post-”Pillow.” Seconds after writing, the song moved into this - I don’t know how to put it exactly - softporn soundtracking, not even Showtime post-midnight but something you might expect to get tracked behind a steamy scene from Models Inc — what the fuck? I’m not one to feel betrayed by a song but this comes close.

Is It Balearic? / ISIT 002
[Listen]
[Nick Sylvester]

When Morrisey entitled his album Your Arsenal, he probably wasn’t just talking about football teams and weapons caches. In Venice of the fifteenth century, your arsenal was just a dockyard (arzenale), but less than a hundred years later, the British were already using (and saying) it as a place to store their weapons. This Arsenal is the Belgian kind, and not the ex-Big Black guitarist’s forays into cat-torture-noise rock. “The Coming” was a ploddy low-key track from their Outsides album, and here it finds its way reworked into downtempo dub-outs from the Idjut Boys, who produce three very different vibes in versions that alternately tickle, stroke, and romp some fluid from the original source.

That particular source is a dreamboat Fujiya and Miyagi soundalike, spongbathed into a bluntbeat fug with vocals that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Whale record. I suppose that makes it some kind of trip-hop whimsy. The Idjuts’ “Version 1″ goes the space-disco route, excavating some dancefloor sparkle from a track that previously wanted nothing but to skin up or roll over. “Version 2″ would work as a minimal tool for the groovewise inclined, and is grounded by a lumberous (to coin a word) bassline that sounds just like the one used on Serafin’s “Nidlenoch”. If it weren’t for the giveaway “spacy” handclaps and bass noodlings, you’d think you were right back there in mnml-land. “Version 3″ brings us back into the realm of the original, but adding in a little fruit juice and sunshine for a gauzy afternoon drift. It’s not overwhelming stuff in any sense, but the comforting roll and sway of each of the versions has made it a morning favourite the past few days. Nice and easy does it.

Play Out! / POM 005
[Listen]
[Peter Chambers]

If kitsch weren’t such a discredited term, we might be tempted to apply it to Peter Visti’s remix choices here, consisting as they do of one wan blues whitey, Dolly Parton, and the mostly forgotten disco-bowtie charlatan Taco. Luckily, Visti is so kitsch he’s beyond kitsch, especially when his nimble fingers grace the source material of our last two subjects. Parton’s “Jolene” becomes almost unrecognizable in Visti’s context, transmogrified into an unlikely underground disco smash you’re certain you heard one stoned night at the Gallery. With bass-driven meanderings and pungent synth swells supporting a filtered guitar strum, it seems Dolly can ride the analog waves as well as any old diva.

Chris Rea’s “Josephine” sounds much more true to form, although I must confess my ignorance with regards to the original track. It’s loads more atmospheric, almost to a fault, and could be any one of a number of innocuous ’80s soundtrack cuts, left out to drift in the realm of the dollar bin. Thankfully, Visti comes back with another surprise, turning the bland swing-disco pabulum of Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” into re-edit gold, morphing the groove into something that’s equal parts Kano and Nitzer Ebb. As though the cast of Fame got choked-up on crystal meth and Baudrilliard’s critical theory, the track resolutely (and brutally) demands you to get your kicks on, lest you suffer the groovy, post-modern consequences. Highly recommended for the not-so-faint of heart.

Mindless Boogie / Mindless 006
[Listen]
[Mallory O’Donnell]

Along with Finland’s Uusi Fantasia and Sweden’s Bjorn Torske, Studio are one of the groups whose sounds and sympathies orbit the cosmos of Prins Thomas’ imagination of space/disco/dub. It’s “not disco” though, or not as we know it, but a form busted open by eccentric tastes and open ears. In a recent interview I did with Prins Thomas, he explained how the relative marginality of Scandanavia (and especially Norway) has kept things prised open, and open things prized. “On the one hand,” he explained, “I could have lived anywhere and made the music I do – but the isolation is important. I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s a lot of diversity here. We’re open to a lot of styles and it’s been an important part of generating our open approach…you have to work hard to please everybody when you play here – there’s no sub-genre nights or anything like that. You can’t afford to be a genre fascist in Oslo.”

Prins’ remix of “Life’s a Beach” opens with an appropriately stomp-paced cosmic bassline with all sorts of shifting Balearic textures thrown over it, slowly rising to full swing alongside spills of space delay. Then, at the five minute mark, by the strange and welcome intrusion of a very 8-bit sounding note, the track reaches its peak (which only sounds once!), after which the whole thing just drifts away on congas and beachy spume. Meanwhile, back at the disco, Todd Terje turns tables on the tracks, rendering “Beach” nocturnally capable with some chunkier percussion, altering the mood from giddy to “giddy up”. Terje likewise uses the same 8-bit note at almost exactly the same point in the track, then opts for the a similar long outro, re-done in a more late-evening fashion. Oddly similar, the two mixes here are sun and moon to each other. Ah, so much good music.

Information / INF 003
[Listen]
[Peter Chambers]

A lot of this stuff sounds to me like “Talk Talk covers the Dances With Wolves soundtrack,” at best when people actually believed rock & roll was something spiritual and not just a backdoor to preteen booty — but to be fair I’ve never heard a note of Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd or Peter Frampton so maybe this London soft-rock act sounds like them too. All the songs on EP1 are really schmaltzy, really serious, even their cover of Ginny’s “Can’t Be Serious” has patient piano and guitar motifs run through who knows how much reverb, and falsetto-heavy vocal melodies just sorta floating atop. Maybe this “rock music for a hot summer night” / Buddha Bar shit is your idea of a good time?

“Can’t Be Serious,” which welded guitar-soloing beardo to nervous arpeggiated midtempo synth-pop, seems to have been the band’s jumpoff for the recent EP2: “Your Love Over Gold,” “People Without Love,” and “Arc of Abraham” use more confident variations of treated synths, balearic guitar, and heavily FX’d lead guitar. Even if you don’t dig them, you can’t deny their conviction, especially on “Your Love Over Gold.” They probably don’t even know they just wrote a shitty “Come Undone,” g’bless’em.

AMO / 001 / 002
[Listen]
[Listen]
[Nick Sylvester]

The seriously-unknown Sorcerer must have impressed somebody down in discoville for his first release to come baited with a remix by no less than Prins Thomas. Easy enough to see why: with all due respect to His Highness, the original is quite handily the superior version. In the field of down-to-midtempo dreamy instrumentals with beaded fringe, “Surfing at Midnight” is dippy rather than hippy, and (quite happily) just baked rather than psychedelic, dude. Like one of those introspective Moroder excursions and your favorite cosmic disco jaunt simultaneously caught in a seven-minute loop of their most pleasing fadeouts. On the remix, Prins Thomas takes a quite adequately long suspension of sensuous moments and stretches it out for another 4:20 (!), but instead of revealing any delicious treats held oyster-like by the original, he just makes the damn thing longer. Still, “Surfing” is refreshingly clean, mercifully unsophisticated and smile-widening, and feels more like a dip in a swimming hole after hiking than it does hanging ten.

Tirk / TIRK 019
[Listen]
[Mallory O’Donnell]

Like his first single for the Rekid label, Toby Tobias still doesn’t settle for anything less than a genre-clusterfuck. “Dave’s Sex Bits” could’ve just coined beardo-house and called it a day, but dude won’t let go of every little toy in his crate. With a constant ambient drone, Tobias stuffs in every swell, light-saber crash, and gurgling birdcall that he can touch. Even the funk licks of the bass are squashed in a song that nods to cosmic aspirations but can’t feel any space. On the flip, Quiet Village (comprised of Rekid label owner Matt Edwards and Joel Martin) rebuilds the sex bits from the ground up. Using delay like a Étienne-Jules Marey photograph, the Quiet Village remix not only captures momentary glimmers of the original song, it also strobes in and out of the regular’s forward progression of time. Thoroughly disorienting and wobbling near the black hole that swallowed Motiivi’s “1939,” Quiet Village’s remix might chug along to its own drummer but it’ll be hard to imagine a more massive sounding remix this year.

REKIDS / REKIDS 011
[Listen]
[Nate DeYoung]

Reverso 68’s new single is somewhat of an anomaly: a disco burner with a rather refined sense of character. Rather than just focusing on one element and turning it up to 11, like an acid synth freak-out or intense barrages of drum programming, Pete Herbert and Phil Mison take each individual instrument and set it to “stun.” The result is an even-keeled, sleek, and shimmering slab of disco that slowly but surely set fire to the dance floor.

Whereas last year’s “Tokyo Disco” read like a groove-infused Kraftwerk, music for the distracted dancers of the future, “Especial” is much more happy to stick it out and debase with abandon. Combinations of popping bass, ricocheting synth lines, stabs of electric guitar, and celebratory chanting all mesh together nicely without over-doing it.

If the A-side is about the party, B-side “Take Me Back (To Yours)” is entirely concerned with the after-party—in the bedroom—and everyone plays it cool. The drums and bass sit back and dig deliberately into the beat, the guitar stands in the corner and chucks along, and the darker synths throb underneath while the track shimmers in and out of consciousness. All the while you can hear the results, a female’s enthused affirmations echoing throughout, climaxing with the repeated mantra, “it feels good on your lips.” And as the last note reverberates into oblivion, there’s a feeling that Reverso 68 have soundtracked one of the best nights out of the year so far.

Eskimo Recordings / 541416 501598
[Listen]
[Peter Lansky]

Both these tracks were on the Boys’ Press Play beardo mix, you’ll recall. The topside is a re-edit of “Lowrider,” an uphill battle from the start considering how much high school pep band muck that song’s been dragged through, but it ends up pretty nice here: fuzzed out percussion, horn riffs discombobulated by reverb and modest EQ FX, everything totally goofy-sounding in the way the song was probably intended. “Barrel Roll” is an edit of Haircut 100’s “Evil Smokestacking Baby,” a schmaltzy midtempo “roll the credits”-type power-jangle—I guess—here further overblown.

White Label / COW 3
[Listen]
[Nick Sylvester]