I LIKE THE WAY

Bodyrockers

There’s a disturbing trend developing in the world of dance music these days – it’s been going on for a while, but it’s only now got beyond the point of being silly. This week I’m having a go at singles that consist almost entirely of a few seconds from an obscure eighties single looped over and over again with little more than a drum loop for company. Do you know what I heard today? I’ll tell you. Somebody has listened to Eric Prydz’s Call On Me and done exactly the same thing to Chris De Burgh’s High On Emotion! Chris De Burgh, for crying out loud! Is this what we’ve been reduced to? The fountain of originality appears to have been shut down and flogged off on eBay, by the looks of things. However, where there’s life there’s hope and after a little hunting around I have managed to find a dance single with an identity all of its own. Picture the scene, you start off with a drummer doing his stuff with a giant wall of jelly separating him from the microphones that are recording his antics so the poor bloke sounds a bit muffled, as you would, but look on the bright side - he’s going to have one hell of a party bag to take home. Then the bass kicks in, along with another bit of (much clearer) drumming – at this point I thought “Hello, this is different”. Not long after, everything goes muffled again and some bloke starts telling his other half how he likes pretty much everything she does – how sweet. He obviously worships the ground she walks on, because as he’s saying all these nice things, the poor chap’s working himself up emotionally into a right state before finally saying how he likes the way she moves, then as the guitars (yes, guitars) take their turn to shine for a while I can only assume he nips off for a cold shower because we don’t hear from him again for a short while. Trouble is, when he comes back he does exactly the same thing – mate, if you keep doing that you’ll never finish the song. I have to say it though, this makes a very nice change from stuff like Uniting Nations and the Freeloaders because it’s different and it works like a charm. It also doesn’t sound as though it was created entirely on a Pentium II running Windows 98 – this too can only be a good thing, not least because Windows 98 was rubbish. I’m going to recommend this one.

BLEED LIKE ME

Garbage (album)

There was me thinking Garbage would only ever turn out the one classic album, silly me. From start to finish, the overwhelming impression of this album is of all the participants putting everything they had into making this as good as is humanly possible. For a start, the technological gimmickry has been stripped away, but the Garbage sound of old remains so there’s no danger of them turning into just another rock band just yet. In fact, they haven’t sounded as fresh as this in nearly ten years and if you thought the single was as good as it could get, wait until you hear Bad Boyfriend and the title track. So far, this year has given me some surprisingly good albums to listen to and this is another one to add to the list. Their first album is still the benchmark, but this is probably as close as they’ll get to topping it.

A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

Elvis Presley vs JXL

That’s the end of that, then. Eighteen weeks, eighteen singles and eighteen large queues outside record shops on Monday mornings later, this is the final re-issue. At least this song won’t sound as out of place in today’s Top 40 as his other former chart-toppers, but I bet absolutely everyone, for one reason or another, is glad it’s finally all over. Elvis fans and eBayers (though not for long) will now proudly own the complete set and everyone else will just be glad that someone else will be in the Top 3 for a change. See, everyone’s a winner.