Category: Dance
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Surprise Chef: Education and Recreation
Surprise Chef are from Melbourne and play funky soul with some nods to jazz. It’s the kind of music you might find in a Tarantino movie, quirky but sharp, and with a real groove. But it usually makes us think of reggae dub plates, those sparse tracks made for other people to add sounds. Surprise…
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Flevans: A Short Distance To Fall
Flevans is a multi-instrumentalist, DJ and, according to his Bandcamp, with an “accessible style” that straddles funk, breaks, soul and electronica. That really saves writing any review, because that’s about what it is. Still, we get paid by the word so … It’s a really good album, nudging in as our contender for album of…
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Sam Redmore: Universal Vibrations
We’re back in the 80s with this; it’s very much of the era when Madonna was big, and so we get walking basslines, Latin percussion, funk, soul and people blowing whistles, the music simply for dancing and not categorising. If you’re a fan of soul / disco from back then, this is for you. It’s…
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The Communards: Red
Bonus tracks can be a bit annoying, a classic album ruined by the bolting-on of outtakes and demos you don’t really care about – but not in this case, the bonus tracks adding gravitas to what might be seen as purely a pop/dance album. The Communards formed in 1985 after singer Jimmy Somerville left Bronski…
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Beautiful People: If 60s Were 90s
This came out ages ago in 1992. We were never too sure of it at the time, being massive Hendrix fans and unable to see the point of adding dance beats to a genius, but it seems much better all these years on. Perhaps we all need cheering up just now. (Though it did cost…
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Pet Shop Boys: Discovery (Live in Rio 1994)
The album opens with a brief and tender Tonight Is Forever before Ab Fab’s Edina Monsoon cries: “Lights! Models! Guest list! Just do your best, darling!” and they launch into I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing. The album then trawls through the hits, Domino Dancing early on, and Rent, Suburbia and King’s Cross…
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Saturday night: South African discopop hits
A review we found – probably just rewriting the Press release – said this focused on the period of fluctuation between the popularity of mbaqanga and the rise of bubblegum pop, with the sounds of disco, pop, boogie, and fusion. We don’t know about that. What we do know is that if you think early…
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