4.24.2008

Rock down to electric avenue

Yikes!
Its been a while.
Sorry for that.

Keepin' this one pretty short and sweet. Heading out of town in a week. I'll try to post a few more before, but I've been so focused on saving gold for my epic flying mount . . . and on getting 75 badges (yeah, I nerded all over the place).

So a couple interested readers have been curious about what music I've been listening to lately.

Well, thanks to Thomas over at
AM 180, I dicovered Wye Oak. I really like their sound. Good for a rainy day, and lord knows we get enough of those around here.

I also recently picked up
Fabriclive 36 mixed by James Murphy and Pat Mahoney. Its a great mix with some choice old skool cuts as well as some nice contemporary tracks with a nostalgic feel. If you need disco, but like your music a bit more quantized and poundy, then you really can't go wrong with this mix.

Booka Shade has a new mix out on Studio K7!'s long-running DJ Kicks series. Now we're nowhere near the series' heyday of Kid Loco, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and Theivery Corporation, but that's not a bad thing. Booka brings their sound and are pushing their label's newer tracks, like Lopazz's "2 Fast 4 U" and they are able to find a nice balance between what Get Physical produces and what K7 brands.

The mix I just can't get enough of these days is
Body Language vol. 5 by Chateau Flight. It culls electro basslines and transmutes them into noiz pop and nurave and back again, but the scorcher that puts the whole disc in place is Ceramic Hello's "Sampling the Blast Furnace." If you don't get splinters from tearing up the dancefloor after that track, then you're not listening to it loud enough.

The most disappointing mixes I've listened to lately are
M.A.N.D.Y.'s Fabric 38 and Junior Boys' Body Language vol. 6. Both mixes have some killer tracks, but really what sinks them are the tracks the just don't fit. The Junior Boys disc is also marred with some crummy mixing (I do better with my crap program). M.A.N.D.Y.'s mix tries really hard to include so many sounds that it becomes mind-numbing around track ten and flatout aggrevating by track 15.
The Junior Boys fare a tad better mainly because their track selection until the last five tracks are phenomenal.
If you want a good M.A.N.D.Y. mix, grab their At the Controls album (which admittedly is more track than mix oriented, but still a better disc).
And the JB's, as much as I love them, should stick to producing their own brand of crooner meets synth-pop.

No comments: