Showing posts with label mr ozio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mr ozio. Show all posts

Jun 6, 2020

On my mind: The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s

The Pet Shop Boys

The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s had some pretty good selections. It's hard to go wrong when you're picking 100 highlights from fewer than 1,500 songs, most of which are hogwash. Take a random year as an example: 1999 number ones by Chef, The Offspring, Boyzone or the Mambo No 5 bloke were hardly going to trouble the list.

Pet Shop Boys' topped their poll, which is entirely the correct choice. Their take on Elvis's Always On My Mind has an incredible energy, like a firework exploding in the boot of a car – I've always considered this the best Christmas number one, so I'm happy to extend it to the best chart topper of all time. Sadly, the Guardian opted for West End Girls as the greatest number one; any fool knows that the other PSB number ones, Heart and It's A Sin, are better than 'Girls. Pfffrt. Just you wait till I get you home, The Guardian.

The Chemical Brothers were just inside their top 50, while the Prodigy soared into their top ten, troubling the likes of Michael Jackson and the Human League. Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body was also in the mix, with it being labelled as "the most minimal No 1 of all time". Black Box and Daft Punk were included, although the latter's only number one song is hardly their best.

Killer made it into their list, with the Guardian praising its perfect design, as did I just last week. Kraftwerk's The Model is also in there, with a welcome shout-out to its brilliant flip-side Computer Love. And while we're doing k-words, the KLF's 3am Eternal made it quite high up the list, proving the ancients of Mu-Mu still have some mojo. This made me sad that Last Train To Trancentral never got to number one. Still, all of these were great to see.

They chose Snap!'s Rhythm Is a Dancer, which I'm sure they were as serious as gout about, but I would have probably have gone for Snap!'s other number one, The Power. That track was so strange and discordant, confusing my head at the time before my heart fell in love with it. The Power knocked Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me off the top spot – another missed contender in this list.

They should have included Pump Up The Volume by MARRS, which incidentally stands for band members Martyn, Alex, Rudy, Russell and Steve. They're like ABBA but with less knitwear. The band didn't get on, and it was a miracle they ever released anything, never mind create a chart-topping acid house classic. And how on earth The Guardian missed The Shamen's Ebeneezer Goode, I have no idea.

There were some outsider choices I would have like to have seen, and would have no doubt made a top 200. For the 1990s, I love the indie spirit of White Town's pin-sharp Your Woman ("So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways, just use me up and then you walk away"), while I mourn the exclusion of Flat Beat by Mr Oizo, which was a blow to yellow puppets everywhere.

There are some 21st century outsiders I'd liked to have seen: Rihanna's Diamonds (they chose Umbrella); Duck Sauce's Barbra Streisand; David Guetta's epic Titanium; Tinie Tempah's Scunthorpe-namechecking Pass Out. Nothing much interesting to say about them – I just like the tunes, dammit.

Like I say, it's an easy list to generally get right, even for people like me who find it difficult to focus on anything before 1987. And not a single mention of Lou Bega's fifth Mambo, despite its remarkable lyric "It's all good, let me dump it, please set in the trumpet". Pardon?

Sep 5, 2010

Ultra-funkulent new band from Squarepusher

Squarepusher's got his funk on with his new project, Shobaleader One.

This ultra-violet super-funkulent video gives us mortals a taste of the eternal bassmasher's new sound  A mini-album with nine tracks (d'Emonstration) is due for release in mid-October. He won't tell us who's in his new band other than to say they are "a bunch of kids" who are "pretty frightening players".

Meanwhile, he has hopped over to Ed Banger Records to release the first track from d'Emonstration: Cryptic Motion is a Daft Punk work-out backed with a sharp-as-hedgehogs Mr Ozio remix.

'Pusher wanted this project to be a "clean break" from his past sound, which may be a relief to some concerned at his inexorable decline into terminal jazz. See what you think. Here's the track list, and snuggled below that is an album preview along with clickable play-bar of Cryptic Motion.

1. Plug Me In
2. Smash Unreason
3. Into the Blue
4. Frisco Wave
5. Megazine
6. Abstract Love
7. Endless Night
8. Cryptic Motion
9. Maximum Planck

Nov 15, 2009

It's like... um... like... er... um... like Flying Lotus covering Lil Wayne


What's Flying Lotus doing covering Lil Wayne?

Lil Wayne (pictured), for those who don't know, is a gun-toting cough syrup-slurping MTV Man Of The Year rap artist who, in his own words, is "lick, like a lollipop".

Bizarre similes aside, Lil Wayne once recorded I Feel Like Dying. This is a Mary Jane toking piece of rap whimsy where Lil (can I call you Lilly?) muses on playing basketball with the moon, and when it's played backwards it seems to throw up the line "without the trousers, we are nude".

Flying Lotus has done his own version of I Feel Like Dying, which is even more blunted than the original. You can hear it on his MySpace page. It's not the first time he's covered Lil Wayne, and I'm all in favour of electronica artists doing other people's tracks.

I'd especially like Venetian Snares to cover the Benny Hill theme tune. Are you reading, Mr Snares? Will you do it? Just for me?

Back to the MySpace tracks. There's another good Flying Lotus track on there too: Prince is a very short tune that sounds like Mr Ozio dropping like it's hot on a Nintendo. Like a sexy Pacman popping blue pills instead of yellow ones.

Put that in your simile pipe and toke it, Lil Wayne.

Sep 11, 2009

Mixin' ma tunesies: Flying Lotus, Rustie and The Black Dog

I've had a strange mixture of two songs stabbing my eardrums all day. The first is Getting Away With It, the melancholic Pet Shop Boys-sprinkled pop song from Electronic. The second is My Humps, the paean to road calming measures by the Black Eyed Peas.

The result is an insistent and disturbing image of Johnny Marr rubbing me all over with his strangely misshapen mammaries. Like being tickled with rubber bags full of gerbils, only in a bad way.

All of which is distracting me from some important record releases about which you, my newly disturbed reader, should know. Each of these feature remixes and are 47% more successful than anything offered by an Electronic / Peas combo.

Last year, Flying Lotus was basking in the glory of his album Los Angeles when he offered us a 12" of strange remixes. If you're quick, you can still pick up copies of Shhhh! It includes, among others, a dirty snare-smacking version of Mr Oizo's Stunts ($tunt$ is the most immediate track here), a drastic scratch mix of J Dilla's Lightwork and a seriously widescreen bass-wobbling Promiscuous Girl by queenzilla of the perfect pout Nelly Furtado.

Rustie's Bad Science EP (Rustie pictured above) is further evidence this young whipperbleeper should be a lot more famous than he is. Bad Science offers up bubbly 8-bit hip hop mentalism, including a reconfiguration of one of the best tracks of 2008, Zig Zag, while still being breathy and prowling like a robot stalker. The whole thing pretty much sounds like Zig Zag, so if you've got that, get this.

And finally, there's an EP from The Black Dog called We Are Sheffield which pours remixes over your speakers until you'll be mopping up massive basslines, glitch techno and warm mellowness from your newly shampooed carpet. It's worth it alone (sadly alone, if I'm honest) for the epic yet moody Autechre remix.