Arab Strap
- title
Love Detective
- label
Chemikal Underground
- format
- CD5
3 song EP with one song destined to be on the new record and two songs that will remain exclusive to this single. My favorite of the three is the title song. "Love Detective" moves along with a nice pace and does not outstay it's welcome or wallow in self-pity (2 things Arab Strap songs sometimes do). "Bullseye" is a acoustic guitar and atmospheric keyboard mellow song that has lyrics chronicling the perpetual defeat of Aidan Moffat (the vocalist). Incidentally, this EP credits the band as just being 2 people - Aidan and Malcolm Middleton. "We Know Where You Live" is a 7:18 peice that reminds me of (ex-Rodan band) The Shipping News in sound. The song sounds like it could have been on the last Arab Strap LP. It has full band with prominent drums and electric guitar. Fave: 1
Chemikal Underground have started putting out this limited series of 12"/CD5's with unreleased stuff by bands. The other two fukd releases are by Aerogramme and Soledad. This release is very good. I like it much better than the Love Detective EP. "Rocket, Take Your Turn" is a 5:41 song that starts right off with electronic beats that become punctuated by an acoustic guitar and soonafter, Aidan's vocals. It is a minimal mix, but it works really well. "Blackness" is an 8:16 song with live drums, electric guitar and bass in a 'Low'-like slowrock setting. As the song goes on it changes a number of times. The guitar becomes a loud shoegazer MBV-styled wash as the song approaches it's closing climax. Fave: 1 
I don't know anything about Crackpot except that they have a single on Tim Love Lee's Tummy Touch label - and that is enough cred for me to buy the single right off. This single is quite good. It has a bouncey feel with a female vocalist sounding like a teenaged Shirley Bassey. She has that soulful lilt. The percussion has an accent on the beat almost like classic stuff like Chic's "I want your love". The vocalist then moves in to a street shuffle rap that just makes the single that much better. Even though this song is not like my sound of the moment (Jpop) it would not sound out of place played in a set with Jpop stuff. On the flip is a Tim Love Lee remix of the song. He adds some background stuff (shakers and a touch of reverb) in the same way The Karminsky Experience did to his song on their remix of his "One Night Samba'. He then echoes the vocal a bit in a dub type way. I like the origianl version of the track better than his remix because the flourishes Time Love Lee puts in remove some of the immediacy and energy that make the origianl version so attractive. Fave: A 
The Fantastic Baggys were a Beach Boys styled surf band who recorded from 1965 to 1965. In reality they were a mythical band - it was only Phil Sloan and Steve Barri, and they only played one gig as The Fantastic Baggys (opening for Jan & Dean) in their career. They did end up writing for Jan & Dean and touring as their backing vocalists. Phil and Steve moved form New York to LA in 1963. They became an incredible songwriting duo and were convinced by Lou Adler to package themselves as a real band so they could release their songs in an LP. I had always thought that the Canadian band Sloan were named after the most popular brand of urinals on this continent, but now, based on a T-shirt I have from sloan that says "Get down Mike Love" I am convinced that the band is named after Phil 'Flip' Sloan of The Baggys. It would fit, and the songs he wrote would justify the love of the band Sloan. This CD has 28 songs - everything that was recorded as The Fantastic Baggys. While most of the songs have that special sound, the three that I love best are "Anywhere The Girls Are", "This Little Woody", and "Move Out, Little Mustang". Faves: 4,6,17 
The A-side is a cover of a classic pop-punk song by Canadian all-girl band B-Girls. In 1979 the B-Girls put out the "Fun at the Beach" 7" on Bomp. It was incredible, and still is one of the standout singles from that era. At WZBC we have a CD that compiles all of the B-Girls stuff. Riff Randells are from the same area as B-Girls - Vancouver B.C. They are named after the character from the movie Rock n' Roll High School. That flick had a great soundtrack with several Ramones songs and a Paley Brothers song that was great.
Before going any further there is one song here that makes the record worth buying straight away. Resonnance's "OK Chicago" (#6) starts off with someone walking and whistling. A voice says "OK" and all of a sudden a volley of machine gun fire goes off. A car starts and off it roars, leading the strack into a chase scenen type track that is a mixture of Steve McQueen's SF chase scene in Bullitt, the wah wah guitar Shaft, and the harpsichord of Get Carter, all puntuated with carsounds and siren samples. It is a monumental track. My second fave is Roland Vincent's "L.S.D. Party" (#9), which has a really nice picked fender bass intro leading into a solid groover with Isley Brothers-styled wah wah lead guitar solo picking, organ and bass. I also like Georges Garvarentz's "Haschich Party"(#3) with the female 'ah-ah-ah-ah' backing vocals. The Francis Lai song "I Don't Know Why"(#8) is the only song with vocals throughout. It is a funky rocker miles aways from his well know 'A Man and a Woman' soundtrack. OK, now for the general description, taken from the CD booklet: "This comp collects French soundtracks from mainly the 60's and 70's. The general sound is between French-Pop and Blaxploitation-reminiscences". Faves: 6,9 
It seems odd that WZBC doesn't have anything by Vladislav Delay in it's library except the odd cut on a compilation like the 'hmm' comp added a few weeks ago. I bought his 'Anima' CD for us but returned it when I realized it consisted of one 60 minute long piece. The vinyl version splits it up into 6 pieces between three 12"s, so maybe we will get that later. For now though, the Uusitalo persona of Vladisav Delay is our best bet. There are 14 songs, and all really have something worth hearing. I really like this CD a lot. I've never heard his first record as Vladislav Deslay, but I've heard the Luomo (his other project) CD and the recent Luomo remix 12", and Uusitalo is still my favorite by a length. Uusitalo has the electronic dub type sound that stuff on Pole's ~scape label, but there is somewhat of a beat to it. It is not 'house' like his Luomo stuff is, but it is not floating sounds like his Vladislav Delay stuff is either. Like the porridge of the three bears, the Uusitalo stuff is just right. Faves: 2,7,9,12
A statement of the labels thinking taken from their website "We find tiny sounds from tiny moments in our life and then an overwhelming urge compels us to shine and share our little jewels with anyone who has the time or patience to understand. We like to call our work "Electric Folk Music"." Lucky Kitchen is a NYC label run by Alejandra Salinas, Aeron Bergman (who records as Dave Underwood), and Daniel Raffel. Their records have all been patched together minidisc recordings of people telling stories or doing things out in the street. Alejandra Salinas put out a 10" we have at WZBC of cassette recordings she made as a little girl growing up in Spain, with people remixing the recordings into electronic pieces on the B-side. 'Find More Hits' is the sequel to the first Lucky Kitchen release 'Find the Hits (and use them)'. They gave the recordings the three made for the first record to several people for reworking. All the artists used computers and electronics to create pieces that were responces to what they heard. Recordings from the first disc are woven into this new record to provide perspective for the new pieces. The artists who presented works for this CD are Pimmon, Sachico M, To Rococo Rot, Suetsu, Semiconductor, Goodiepal & Tordis, I-Sound, Jansky Noise, Nick Birmingam, Jeswa, Matmos, and Hrvatski. Songs found amongst the snippets: 6,8,12,14,16,18,20,27,24,29 
Yukari Fresh's second album is my favorite of hers. I really like the first (Yukari's Perfect), but it is so short. This record was where she really got a handle of the sample heavy beat driven sound that became known later as Jpop. Listening to this disc to write this review I forgot how much I like her stuff. In my home listening I've been concentrating on newer artists like Mansfield, Losfeld, and Cubismo Grafico, but truth is that Yukari Fresh has everything I like about those artists and has been doing it longer than they. This is pop with a really upbeat bright texture. It is busy with collaged sounds that seem like they should not work together but do. It is not at all like artists such as Kahimi Karie. Yukari's vocals do not have the whisper sound that Kahimi copped from Claudine Longet. There is one song written about the Manchester United Football start Paul Scholes, renowned for his bright red hair and scoring lots of goals. There are some songs on this disc I like so much that I felt I had to split up my 'faves' list into first and second string favorites. This disc and the Los Sampler's disc split the honor of being my faves of this weeks adds. Faves:4,6,10,11 Second-string faves:2,3,8 
Jerk, Jazz & Psychobeat de France' says the cover of this second volume of library music from the 60's and 70's. This volume features tracks from the IM (L'Illustration Musicale) label. It has 16 tracks. 13 by label founder Eddie Warner, 2 from Roger Morris, and 1 from Cecil Leuter. As Eddie says "Music is the lifeblood of film. It is what brings images to life". Among the various endorsements on the back are "breakbeat heaven with doses of psychedelic madness" - Darren Knott (Ninja Tune) & "stripped down, drum heavy, and raw" - Andy Votel (Twisted Nerve). While this comp outwardly seems very similiar to the Shake Sauvage comp, this one reflects more of a single mind than the wide spanning collection Shake Sauvage. Faves: 9,10,12 
Los Samplers is one of the many projects of