Twenty Sizeable Songs
Twenty Songs, 21 January 2007
Another week, another twenty songs and another series of difficult omissions. So hotly contested was this week's Twenty that we've had to fiddle the figures pretty badly just to fit in most of the songs we wanted to. So. Without further ado..
We kick off pretty much where we've been up to now, how 2007 kicks off, with Tiga and Move My Body (Boys Noize Remix). Pretty close to the Alkan oriented original, this is scuffed and scuzzy house with a pretty filthy bassline which would make even the owner of the best kept record player in the world question his needle quality. Next up, the thing about Jupiter Room (Martian Assault Edit) by Digitalism is that you don't realise how BIG a record it is until about two thirds of the way through and it drops that massive rush on you and everything just goes mental. When it does though, you do realise. Massive.
And yet, if we're honest, nowhere near as big as Welcome To Jamrock by Damian Marley. Which is possibly the biggest song we own. It could be considered a bit out of place in our lists, the only real rootsical song we lay claim to, but heaven knows it is big enough to hand its own in any playlist. Pure JA muscle. Meanwhile, another bit of carcrash house for ya, in the shape of Boys Noize own Feel Good (TV = Off). So called despite the main vocal being television on. Oh well, main thing is that it's filthy great and we all want to have approximately a million of its dirty dancefloor babies. If we can.
Speaking of massive tunes, which, apparently, (understandably given the format), we are, let's for a moment discuss Armshouse by Shystie and featuring Ron E Red Eyez. Utter pandemonium should ensure every time this gets played. There isn't a single piece of hip hop we've heard hit the charts in ages that is near the size of this beast and yet, and yet, little old UK grime, didn't get anywhere did it. Deserved to be huge, still does. Everywhere. While elsewhere we understand why more 4hedz music like Staircase To Stage by Jehst doesn't make it. It's for the fans, from the underground and while it's got the beats and hooks it's most the skills, the art, the makes it the winner it is. Armshouse is just big. Big big big.
Now. When we talk about size one thing we have to mention is the fact that she's, got, the. looks.. That's right. The Looks, by MSTRKRFT who have dropped one of the biggest disco albums of recent years and everyone think they're Daft Punk at the moment. Frankly, only Daft Punk are more Daft Punk than MSTRKRFT and that's about as high a compliment as it gets from us. Finally, scaling it down from all this giganticism is Pre, with their wirey, scratchy, painful as all punk hell broken loose Dead Pony. We'd prefer it to have been a bit shorter but it's still damn good at what it does and what it does definitely it's pretty. Not by the time Pre have finished with it. Until Uffie, who is quite pretty (we think) and more importantly, is a Hot Chick. That's both a true statement and the name of the song of hers we were bumming most this week. The pure legend that is. It's bouncy and ruff and just switches it, frankly, all over the dancefloor with the best kind of impertinence. Gosh. Finally for the lower half of this All Good™ chart, It's All by Wonder featuring Faction G whose slightly awkward delivery and slightly ill conceived conceit is just the icing on the cake of what is a big bastard of a dubby grime soundsystem destroyer. You know.
Staying on a grime tip, Ears gives us the, again, pretty big Everything Bless, Everything Fine, another one of his tracks that just sounds like the finished article. Words, flows, beats, sounds, all in the right place at the right time and yet, still yet, nobody's gonna hear it outside the endz. Wrong. Where's the justice? Weak imports, strong at home, yet we still lap it up from everywhere but here. Oh well, the same can't be said of indie and so at least Maps has a chance at some proper recognition and certainly with understated majesty like Don't Fear he's going in very much the right direction. He's got a CD out of his songs to date apparently (oh yeah, no-one tells us this stuff), go find. Go. Well, maybe stay 'til the end of the Twenty first, otherwise you're in danger of missing Leni by GoodBooks which has finally grown on us in a way that perhaps only the first two songs haven't had to. Still, you can hear the quality ooze from every pour of this band in everything they do so we'll forgive them a little loss of instancy. The main thing is that this is still good good sound. Pleasant perhaps, easy on the ears maybe, a little lacking in the friction we tend to champion but who cares. Yum.
We were surprised to find out Tokyo Police Club were Canadian and more so to discover how much we liked Nature Of The Experiment. We do though, it's lovely and fun and exciting and danceable without being like all the indie dance we've been flooded with of late and if they keep it up they may have a fan in us. Someone who already has a fan in us is Blood Red Shoes, to the extent that even the b-side of their recent singe can hit six in the Twenty, at a time when, frankly, we're still somewhat bumming the a-side. We don't think Try Harder is anything to do with the label from whom they've recently separated but it is all about trying to make yourself look good for the NME. Something we can all aspire to.
we'll change our haircut, we'll change our footwear, we'll change ideas to fit what magazines say
In the meantime, into the top five and I think everyone know we're fans of Fields and were bound to be fans of If You Fail We All Fail (SebastiAn Remix), because, hey, we bum SebastiAn to absolute death. We're like a self fulfilling prophecy at times. It's fine though, we're happy with it. I mean, in many ways we were always gonna love Infants, who this week supplied us lovingly (as in we bought and paid for it) with the Friend Paste 7" and, more specifically, the song Firetruck Theme, which is in the chart (though the flip is also very nice). Wait, wait, no, nice isn't the word. Horrific? Like seeing an innocent person dragged from a car with blood all over them but still not being able to shake the feeling that they are very attractive and you totally would. Post punk wirey Pre-esque but more fun without losing the screeching acerbicness. Ouch. Our eardrums.
Speaking of giganticism (as we were some time ago), have you heard The Black Ghosts' Face (Charlie Fanclub Remix). Because you want to have. It's big as they come. We don't know who Charlie Fanclub is but we very much want to. His and Kissy Sell Out's remixes of this decent but in an only alright kinda way electro pop song is switched and carcrashy as a inflatable whorehouse. I mean. We love it. Obviously.
Scaling it all RIGHT back, though, is Encam byEinóma. We love Einóma and will do so for possibly the rest of time. That's just something that we will do. If we were ever hoping to love them any less, certainly it isn't helped by their return from the void in the form of Encam EP and the three songs (and remix) thereon. Dark and brooding and flickering and the whole reason downtempo leftfield music was invented. It was invented to make us happy and this definitely does that.
Which just takes us back to the land of the giants. Specifically, Kissy Sell Out (yeah, we've been bumming him a fair bit already, right?) and his track, Her. Dunno why it's called her, dunno why he's called Kissy Sell Out. We don't know and we don't care. As long as he keeps pumping out virtually illegal great slabs of carcrash house like this we'll be fine and won't worry our pretty little heads. Her knows no bounds to it's flickering between classic sleaze merchant dance hooks and coupled with the ultra fine crushed glass speckling of acid spits, we are all for it.
Another week, another twenty songs and another series of difficult omissions. So hotly contested was this week's Twenty that we've had to fiddle the figures pretty badly just to fit in most of the songs we wanted to. So. Without further ado..
We kick off pretty much where we've been up to now, how 2007 kicks off, with Tiga and Move My Body (Boys Noize Remix). Pretty close to the Alkan oriented original, this is scuffed and scuzzy house with a pretty filthy bassline which would make even the owner of the best kept record player in the world question his needle quality. Next up, the thing about Jupiter Room (Martian Assault Edit) by Digitalism is that you don't realise how BIG a record it is until about two thirds of the way through and it drops that massive rush on you and everything just goes mental. When it does though, you do realise. Massive.
And yet, if we're honest, nowhere near as big as Welcome To Jamrock by Damian Marley. Which is possibly the biggest song we own. It could be considered a bit out of place in our lists, the only real rootsical song we lay claim to, but heaven knows it is big enough to hand its own in any playlist. Pure JA muscle. Meanwhile, another bit of carcrash house for ya, in the shape of Boys Noize own Feel Good (TV = Off). So called despite the main vocal being television on. Oh well, main thing is that it's filthy great and we all want to have approximately a million of its dirty dancefloor babies. If we can.
Speaking of massive tunes, which, apparently, (understandably given the format), we are, let's for a moment discuss Armshouse by Shystie and featuring Ron E Red Eyez. Utter pandemonium should ensure every time this gets played. There isn't a single piece of hip hop we've heard hit the charts in ages that is near the size of this beast and yet, and yet, little old UK grime, didn't get anywhere did it. Deserved to be huge, still does. Everywhere. While elsewhere we understand why more 4hedz music like Staircase To Stage by Jehst doesn't make it. It's for the fans, from the underground and while it's got the beats and hooks it's most the skills, the art, the makes it the winner it is. Armshouse is just big. Big big big.
Now. When we talk about size one thing we have to mention is the fact that she's, got, the. looks.. That's right. The Looks, by MSTRKRFT who have dropped one of the biggest disco albums of recent years and everyone think they're Daft Punk at the moment. Frankly, only Daft Punk are more Daft Punk than MSTRKRFT and that's about as high a compliment as it gets from us. Finally, scaling it down from all this giganticism is Pre, with their wirey, scratchy, painful as all punk hell broken loose Dead Pony. We'd prefer it to have been a bit shorter but it's still damn good at what it does and what it does definitely it's pretty. Not by the time Pre have finished with it. Until Uffie, who is quite pretty (we think) and more importantly, is a Hot Chick. That's both a true statement and the name of the song of hers we were bumming most this week. The pure legend that is. It's bouncy and ruff and just switches it, frankly, all over the dancefloor with the best kind of impertinence. Gosh. Finally for the lower half of this All Good™ chart, It's All by Wonder featuring Faction G whose slightly awkward delivery and slightly ill conceived conceit is just the icing on the cake of what is a big bastard of a dubby grime soundsystem destroyer. You know.
Staying on a grime tip, Ears gives us the, again, pretty big Everything Bless, Everything Fine, another one of his tracks that just sounds like the finished article. Words, flows, beats, sounds, all in the right place at the right time and yet, still yet, nobody's gonna hear it outside the endz. Wrong. Where's the justice? Weak imports, strong at home, yet we still lap it up from everywhere but here. Oh well, the same can't be said of indie and so at least Maps has a chance at some proper recognition and certainly with understated majesty like Don't Fear he's going in very much the right direction. He's got a CD out of his songs to date apparently (oh yeah, no-one tells us this stuff), go find. Go. Well, maybe stay 'til the end of the Twenty first, otherwise you're in danger of missing Leni by GoodBooks which has finally grown on us in a way that perhaps only the first two songs haven't had to. Still, you can hear the quality ooze from every pour of this band in everything they do so we'll forgive them a little loss of instancy. The main thing is that this is still good good sound. Pleasant perhaps, easy on the ears maybe, a little lacking in the friction we tend to champion but who cares. Yum.
We were surprised to find out Tokyo Police Club were Canadian and more so to discover how much we liked Nature Of The Experiment. We do though, it's lovely and fun and exciting and danceable without being like all the indie dance we've been flooded with of late and if they keep it up they may have a fan in us. Someone who already has a fan in us is Blood Red Shoes, to the extent that even the b-side of their recent singe can hit six in the Twenty, at a time when, frankly, we're still somewhat bumming the a-side. We don't think Try Harder is anything to do with the label from whom they've recently separated but it is all about trying to make yourself look good for the NME. Something we can all aspire to.
we'll change our haircut, we'll change our footwear, we'll change ideas to fit what magazines say
In the meantime, into the top five and I think everyone know we're fans of Fields and were bound to be fans of If You Fail We All Fail (SebastiAn Remix), because, hey, we bum SebastiAn to absolute death. We're like a self fulfilling prophecy at times. It's fine though, we're happy with it. I mean, in many ways we were always gonna love Infants, who this week supplied us lovingly (as in we bought and paid for it) with the Friend Paste 7" and, more specifically, the song Firetruck Theme, which is in the chart (though the flip is also very nice). Wait, wait, no, nice isn't the word. Horrific? Like seeing an innocent person dragged from a car with blood all over them but still not being able to shake the feeling that they are very attractive and you totally would. Post punk wirey Pre-esque but more fun without losing the screeching acerbicness. Ouch. Our eardrums.
Speaking of giganticism (as we were some time ago), have you heard The Black Ghosts' Face (Charlie Fanclub Remix). Because you want to have. It's big as they come. We don't know who Charlie Fanclub is but we very much want to. His and Kissy Sell Out's remixes of this decent but in an only alright kinda way electro pop song is switched and carcrashy as a inflatable whorehouse. I mean. We love it. Obviously.
Scaling it all RIGHT back, though, is Encam byEinóma. We love Einóma and will do so for possibly the rest of time. That's just something that we will do. If we were ever hoping to love them any less, certainly it isn't helped by their return from the void in the form of Encam EP and the three songs (and remix) thereon. Dark and brooding and flickering and the whole reason downtempo leftfield music was invented. It was invented to make us happy and this definitely does that.
Which just takes us back to the land of the giants. Specifically, Kissy Sell Out (yeah, we've been bumming him a fair bit already, right?) and his track, Her. Dunno why it's called her, dunno why he's called Kissy Sell Out. We don't know and we don't care. As long as he keeps pumping out virtually illegal great slabs of carcrash house like this we'll be fine and won't worry our pretty little heads. Her knows no bounds to it's flickering between classic sleaze merchant dance hooks and coupled with the ultra fine crushed glass speckling of acid spits, we are all for it.