Take 'Em To Church

Eddie Kendricks, "Keep On Truckin'" (A Tom Moulton Mix) - There are of course a billion reasons why one shouldn't get lazy and allow one's pittance of a readership to drop back down to squat from squat-and-a-half, but it's hard to ignore the one immutable positive, namely the continued ability to post ridiculously gigantic files without worrying about using up a month's worth of bandwidth. Because Christ Almighty y'all, I can't imagine why I would have ever started up an mp3 blog in the first place but for to post songs like this mix of "Keep On Truckin'" courtesy of the utterly unimpeachable Tom Moulton compilation recently released on Soul Jazz. It is, to put it mildly, eleven minutes of unadulterated perfection - horn blasts straight outta Valhalla, choral flourishes that almost make church - church - appealing, keys warmer and sunnier than the ones at the tip of Florida...basically everything sane people could want a disco song to have, and for eleven minutes to boot. Of course, to anyone familiar with Tom Moulton, this should hardly be a surprise; Moulton's ear for What Works is legendary in its acuteness (frequently far moreso than the artists actually responsible for the songs he remixes), and he's among the very boldest when it comes to telling the world to fuck off and putting the song together to suit his eminent ears. And man oh man are his ears on point here. I mean, "Keep On Truckin'" is practically a work of impressionism to begin with; between the relentless thud of the bass kick and the hypnotically angelic vibraphone hits, Eddie Kendricks hardly has to open his mouth to get the point of the song across (although of course we are all the richer as a human race for his having done so), and it is to Moulton's great credit that he's able to expand the song practically into infinity without compromising the original one iota. Frankly, it's hard to understand what kind of a God would create a world where a song this good, this classically good, could go unreleased for over thirty years only to lie in ambush as the opening song on a compilation CD; it really should have conquered the world. Oh well, I guess; better late than never. I mean wow. (Click here to buy A Tom Moulton Mix from Amazon.co.uk. It is without hesitation the best CD released in 2006 thus far, so fuckin' do it already)

The Fratellis, "Creeping Up The Backstairs" - I like to think of buying singles sight unseen & sound unheard as a more socially acceptable form of reading the tarot, by which I mean I like to come up with elaborate excuses as to why I have a shelf full of singles that'll probably never see a CD laser again for as long as they stay in my collection. Of course, every so often one does manage to read the tea leaves correctly and come up with a winner - after all, for every hundred billion up & coming press blurbs trumpeting a band's three-part harmonies or attempting to wedge them in between the Kinks and the Libertines, there's always at least one band like the Fratellis out there who actually, y'know, does it. "Creeping Up The Backstairs" is just simply one of thsoe songs where I needed about three chord changes before I knew I was in the presence of something insanely fun - it's just exactly the kind of song that slides into the tracklisting of any mix CD you might need to make with devastating ease, the kind of song you love passing around to your friends because it makes you look like you actually know something when really you just know how to spend money, the kind of song with a chorus you can only sit back and wish you'd had enough talent to write. So yeah, let's hope there's big things in store for the Fratellis; lord knows the world could use more songs like this one. (Click here to purchase other songs from the Fratellis' debut EP - now sadly out of print - from iTunes)