Twenty-three skidoo...twenty-four...

I've been listening to a lot more dance music than normal lately. Obviously, this is at least partly due to the motherfuckin' Prettiest Pony suddenly appearing out of nowhere fully stocked with the exact sounds I didn't even know I'd been waiting to hear (newest obsession: the Onemusic session version of the Knife's "Heartbeats" in this post, most likely the definitive version of the song as far as my ears go), but seeing as how I can still remember kicking off both 2004 and 2005 with a locked-on heatseeking fixation on dance music, I have to think it's at least partially motivated by some need in the carnival atmosphere known as the inside of my skull. My guess is that it comes from the pressure of the new year; if you like to use music to feel some forward momentum in your life (which, as a sad little man, I do), the early part of the year can be mighty depressing since music doesn't necessarily take its cues to progress from a ball dropping in Times Square. Dance music, on the other hand, is relentlessly progressive, almost to a fault - since it's so nakedly driven by technology, someone's always out there trying to use the newest gizmos to make different stuff come out of the speakers, which on the one hand means that anyone who buys those DJ mix CDs with any eye towards keeping them in the future is essentially kidding themselves (and believe you me, I'm damning myself more than any of you in that regard), but on the other hand sure can make for some compelling listening when the only thing rock music's giving you to get excited about is the simple fact that the leaks say 2006 instead of 2005 now. It's like playing dice with your cred, except that since I have no cred I can just whip them bones all over the map and see if anything interesting turns up.

And something did.

Tiga, "Good As Gold" (Morgan Geist Monophonic mix) - Of course, now I gotta worry about whether I've hyped you all up too much for a song which, as much as I love it and as often as I listen to it, isn't a revelation and isn't necessarily even anything you've heard before; it is "merely" one of those really fucking great chilled-out disco numbers the world can only get out of Morgan Geist. I've gone on record before about how I frequently find Geist's records, even/especially the much-loved by much-smarter-than-me people Metro Area stuff, problematic - it's not that they're bad per se, but they tend to leave me feeling like I'm listening to a good idea for a dance song instead of a good dance song itself, which is why people who actually pay attention to the world tend to get distracted by shiny objects whenever I open my mouth on the subject. But listening to the "Good As Gold" mix, it occurred to me that maybe it's just Geist's instrumental stuff that doesn't work on me, because whenever the man works with vocals I tend to find myself absolutely transfixed. Geist's production jobs are, after all, primarily spectacular in how well-balanced they are; all the elements of the song always presented in such tastefully monitored proportions that even the rod-up-the-ass-est hipster can't find anything to get embarassed over, which is fine for most people but not so enthralling for those of us who like it when disco forces us to confront our own humanity by shoving eighty tons of cowbells and whistles down our throat until we give in and have fun. Vocals, then, are the great humanizer, even when they're as laconic and breathy as Tiga's - fuck, if Discovery has nothing else left to teach us, we should at least all try to learn the lesson that people do, in fact, like it when dance music does more than get them to the breakdown.

Of course, in the case of the "Good As Gold" mix, the breakdown is probably my favorite bit of music I've heard so far out of 2006, or at least right up there with other such luminaries as "the whooshing bits towards the end of the JLC remix of 'Talk'" or "the way 'Red Light' suddenly snaps into action". Most of my favorite records are ones where I can clearly point to people having the times of their lives making them (it's not a coincidence, for instance, that Debbie Harry never sounds like she's having more fun than she does when she sings "Dreaming", my favorite song ever full-stop), and I can't imagine Geist having anything other than an absolute ball getting those banging sorta-ravey sorta-italo-y synths in the breakdown to sound just right. And it's not even just the effects in play (although they really are kinda awesome); I'd honestly believe you if you told me Geist played the keys on the breakdown live and then just filtered the hell out of them later, since it really does sound like he's punishing those keys for all their tangible, unforgivable warmth. My mind's eye actually refuses to see anything other than Geist wailing away on them on stage in the throes of an inadvertant Stevie Wonder impersonation - I just can't buy anything option other than "this is what it sounds like when you play the hell out of some keys". Maybe that's why I like Geist's vocal tracks better than his "better" ones - they're the only ones where he bends to the pressure of embarassing himself for the benefit of the rest of us. (Click here to buy
the "Good As Gold" single from Juno)

Delerium, "After All" (feat. Jael) (Satoshi Tomiie remix) - It's entirely possible that this song may well be my favorite song I've unearthed in the process of going through all my old house/trance/breaks mp3s from back when I used to read Mixmag during Bush's first term (yes, Virginia, people actually used to read Mixmag), although odds are pretty good that you'd never have caught me admitting it before Trentemoeller showed up last year to reintroduce everyone to the matchless pleasures of nakedly ravey techno overtly catering to the non-sober. I mean, I like the Royksopp remix as much as the next guy, but if you think that batshit psychotic breakdown came out of the void, get ready to correct yourself; "After All" may kinda shigga-shigga a little too shamelessly to slide seamlessly in with today's doctrinally-prescribed ketamine house sound, but god almighty, what it lacks in appropriateness it makes up for in a huge way with melodrama. At the risk of ruining the song for you, the best part has to be when all of a sudden it doubles back on itself towards the end; after spending six-plus minutes riding out on those squelchy synth eruptions, it falls on the guitar (easily the "cheesiest" element of the song, although I stopped caring about that shit the day I bought my second Billy Joel album) to push the song to its ultimate extreme. Possibly the most shocking thing is a song this overblown came out of the head of Satoshi Tomiie, who back in the day was downright Geist-esque in his "respectability" (or at least among the Mixmag set) - I mean, you spend years listening to someone's eminently tasteful deep house stuff, and then all of a sudden you come face to face with a song this lush and dramatic (keep in mind I heard it for the first time when Gabriel & freakin' Dresden used it as the climax of a set, which would sort of be the equivalent of Ben Kingsley showing up at the end of a Michael Bay movie to beat the shit out of everyone). I mean, what can you really do except thank God for it? (Click here to buy the "After All" CDS single from Amazon.com)

ELSEWHERE
- Two new additions to the sidebar - Sabas, who brings the nuclear heat of Panico's "Transpiralo" (a song I've thought more than once about posting on here), and Panda Rescue, which brings enough brass to shout down a general. Hop to it.