ARGH

Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but strep throat can really suck on both my balls at once. Somehow I managed to maintain a twenty-five year streak of not getting it, but like my mom always said, "Streaks are just a way for you to measure the time between failing". Or something. Anyway, here's some music.

Joakim, "I Wish You Were Gone" (vocal edit) - Look, here's the deal: I really, really, really want to open this up by discussing Joakim as an active participant in that whole Justice/Digitalism/Nite Versions BOSH-BOSH-BOSH school of dancecraft who just happens to have come up with a song so meticulously engineered to my particular tastes in dance music, but since (A) I doubt I could even name one of his singles beyond this one and (B) I'm far, far too lazy to beat up the Hype Machine to educate myself, I'm kinda left holding my dick here. Fortunately, "I Wish You Were Gone" is the kind of song that hardly needs backstory to be great; I'll admit that I probably wouldn't have downloaded it if someone hadn't sold me on the basis of its "shocking similarity" to LCD Soundsystem's El Super Classico "Beat Connection", but you can rest assured that my reasons for loving it have absolutely nothing to do with any similarities it may share with the body of work of Messrs. Murphy, Goldsworthy, and Galkin. Hell, if anything, I like "I Wish You Were Gone" for the way it pretty much breaks with the wild-n-woolly DFA aesthetic alltogether; it's a modern masterpiece of slinky, snaky fun, and it's got a sense of its own space that DFA records just don't ever seem to have (q.v. the way the otherwise-unremarkable guitar and synth lines combine to blast the track into hyperdrive once they come together towards the end of the song - I love DFA like mothers love their children, but it's been a good long while since I've heard one of their tracks play itself against, uh, itself with anywhere near that kind of efficacy). It really is quite a little track, and I can't imagine living in a world where it's not a stone-cold classic among the "Oh no, not dance music! *SNIIIIIIIIFF*" set. And in the end, I'll gladly take that as a reason to post a track other than yet another tired variation on the "Hey! I'm retarded!" theme. (Click here to buy the "I Wish You Were Gone" single from Juno)

Union of Knives, "Opposite Direction" - I've tried to dap up Union of Knives in this space before, but never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that they'd come up with an album as frighteningly substantial as Violence and Birdsong, their recent debut out now on Relentless. I'm actually a little hesitant to talk about it too much; it's one of those dangerous albums that's not quite good enough to be a part of your top-howevermany favorite albums while still getting an obscene amount of playtime, in many cases moreso than albums on your list proper, and I'd hate to give the illusion otherwise. But fuck, just because it happens to have been released during something of an annus mirabilis for audience-friendly indie synthpop doesn't diminish its worth as an object; I'm guessing that people would be breaking stuff over their heads in a frenzy of excitement over this album if it hadn't had the misfortune to come out during the same year as So This Is Goodbye and The Eraser (and, to be sure, The Looks). See, sometime between recording the single mix of "Evil Has Never" (i.e. the last time they popped up on my radar), they went into the studio with someone who knew how to transform their innate noodliness into this throbbing behemoth lunging forward with every throbbing stab of bass; now, songs that once sounded like your friends fucking around with Casio presets suddenly come off as Soulwax album tracks, and I hasten to add that that's the worst-case scenario. Needless to say, the change does a powerful amount of good for some of the songs, but I'd actually single out opener "Opposite Direction" as the best example of the album's virtues wholesale - if you can't get down with that ominously-swirling low end or that gradual pitch-up, you might want to pass on Violence and Birdsong alltogether. Of course, in doing so, you might also reveal yourself to be a dumbass. Fortunately, for once, that's not my problem. (Click here to buy Violence and Birdsong from Amazon.co.uk)

Dead Disco, "City Place" - Although my cynical inner monologue keeps pushing a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason for the recent mini-renaissance of Dead Disco among mp3 bloggers has to do with their inclusion in the emailings going out to said bloggers from A Certain Unnamed Record Promotion Firm right into the forefront of my brain, I'd much rather think of it as a moment of the collective unconscious waking the fuck up to a really happening new band in a big way en masse if given the choice. Hell, I consider myself to be Public Victim Number One when it comes to this "My favorite record from the Britpop era has to be Elastica's first album" method of songcraft, and even I slept on them pretty embarassingly (although in my defense, at least part of that had to be due to the fact that I was introduced to them via Metronomy's landmark case of thunder-stealing on the remix of "The Treatment"). And anyway, what's ultimately more important than whoever happened to have been at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City is the fact that these girls are kinda sorta really excellent at their chosen idiom; I have a hard time comparing bands to Blondie since Blondie's kinda, y'know, my favorite band ever, but goddamn if Dead Disco don't nail the marriage of artfully removed curled-lip vocals to insanely involving hooks as well as anyone in recent memory. Admittedly, a large part of my reasoning behind choosing "City Place" is the fact that it's the biggest track of theirs that hasn't been blogged about elsewhere, but I'd also say that it's as good an example of their aesthetic in action as they've come up with yet, especially if one were to boil it down to the way those soaringly cheesy synths play counterpoint to the elegantly dehumanizing harmonies on the "I won't be your angel now" vocals. At the very least, I'd say that they deserve to attain at least the level of success enjoyed by the Long Blondes, and lest you think that I'm trying to damn them with faint praise, remember that in a more just world, the Long Blondes would already be enjoying a level of success at least forty or fifty times greater than that of Franz Ferdinand. They're quite the little band - let's just thank god they hired the right PR firm and call it a day. (Click here to buy the What We All Want compilation featuring "City Place" direct from the label, Dance to the Radio)