By my reckoning, no song in the kraut/kosmische rock genre has ever matched the sprawling jubilation of La Rheinita, an anthemic instrumental from 1978 propelled by the lumbering tom drum workout that would be lifted pretty much part & parcel by Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott and songwriter Midge Ure (who was in Visage and would wind up fronting Ultravox) for Yellow Pearl. Hats off to the man for his great taste. Could a nation whose development as an industrial powerhouse depended entirely on steel fail to produce a genre of music that sounded like this? At about the 3:08 mark, the song rockets way into the stratosphere . I never tire of this song...
From the vaults of the fecklessly fey Cherry Red Records: Morgan Fisher, a tickler of ivories (synthetic & not), took it upon himself to pay tribute to Mott the Hoople's top 10 hit with an abrasive and charming lo-fi cover. File this somewhere between Bruce Haack and Ariel Pink, and for comparison I leave you with a raga-like synth-workout from the late Mr. Haack, long-time mp3 blog favourite.
Despite its giant floating plastic vortex twice the size of Texas, is my preferred fish provider and general all-around ocean. So, here's a little something from the close-to-the-coast duo Neighbourhood Romeo, comprised of Calgary, Alberta's Wax Romeo & Neighbour. Fun and crisp funk with a up-pitched Loleatta Holloway vocal sample that helps buoy oil city's reputation as a fine producer of super-slick sleeper funk hits. Grab whatever you can from these guys. Neighbour will be in Montreal performing at Studio Just For Laughs on Thursday, October 1st as part of Pop Montreal's Red Bull Mega Hurtz alongside Grahmzilla (of Thunderheist), Hovatron (aka Phil Aubin), Lunice, Megasoid, and uh, some sort of weird Burning Man hippie-techno-alien-rave DJ named JELO. Don't know who programmed that...
Okay, so the Fatback Band (later Fatback) were never from the West Coast, but they sound like it. Good enough.
LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 remixes got leaked. Eight in total, from Padded Cell, Pilooski, Riley Reinhold, Prins Thomas, Trus’me Prince Language and Theo Parrish. Stream them in 320 kbps on Feel My Bicep.
In 1999, Kappa Alpha Psi frat brother and R&B superstar Montell Jordan took a trick from the Puff Daddy toolbox, sampling Claudja Barry's Love For the Sake of Love for his chart-topping single Get It On Tonite, the video of which featured an early example of text-message infidelity, making a case for the zeitgeist-anticipating qualities of the R&B genre. In 1980 was there a rock band with a track as prescient as Ronnie Jones' Video Games? (Incidentally, that song was also produced by Claudja Barry's pet-producer, who I discuss later). Not likely!
David Shaw is one-half of the Loose Joints duo here in Montreal, an incredibly talented graphic designer, and an extremely nice & hilarious guy to boot. He's also associated with the international DJ & production cartel Attitude City. For whatever reason, David & Davey Lahteenma (the other 1/2) are one of Montreal's best kept secrets - mixing & mastering for years and earning them the righteous love and appreciation of everyone who ever manages to catch their set, as well as bringing in Hercules & Love Affair, Brennan Green, Mike Simonetti & countless other guests before their big moments in the blogspotlight. Hopefully I'll have some other edits to post in the next little while, but in the mean-time, here's a live-set of David Shaw recorded last year entitled Disco's Dead. (Full-disclosure, I had the great privilege to DJ with him this past Saturday at Pop Montreal's Italo Disco Bike In and it was awesome.)
And now to our diva... Jamaican-transplant turned Torontonian Claudja Barry left Boney M in 1976 to pursue her own singing career, and thank God, because it gave us many great & fine songs, not the least of which is the simple and strutting song Love For The Sake of Love, the b-side to 1976's Sweet Dynamite. Production duties on this (and many other Claudja Barry tracks) were handled by German producer Jurgen S. Korduletsch, who prior to this was working with kraut-rockistes Amon Düül II.
Kraut-rock & disco are not mutually exclusive, which is where Can's I Want More comes in. Also released in 1976 (on the album Flow Motion), the seemingly disparate worlds of the dancefloor & Deutschland find themselves in perfect union here, and thus became their only Top 40 hit in the UK and earned them a slot on Top of the Pops. The guitar-work & full-group vocals on this song are amazing, and the organ-stab anticipates the same stab on Diana Ross' My Old Piano.
