“Fascination”
by Alphabeat
(Copenhagen/EMI, UK)
The second I picked my jaw up off the floor after listening to this
recent English hit for the first time, I turned to my girlfriend.
“Katrina and the Waves,” I said. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s kind of
annoying.” She was right, but it didn’t matter, because I was already
obsessed. The last time and place records this bright and bouncy were
(a) made without synthesizers predominating, and (b) getting the radio
play they were so obviously dying for was in early ’80s England.
Alphabeat, a coed sextet from Denmark, have that sound writ good and
big here: huge beat, piano announcing the chord changes, hand claps and
tambourines (oh my), clean guitars both lead and rhythm, boy-girl
harmonies so goddamned enthusiastic that their whisper-to-shout
exchange on the bridge (he: “The word is on your lips”; she: “Say the
word,” over and over) might say it all if they weren’t trumped by the
drop-dead-perfect background “woo!” that crashes back into the chorus.
Like the verse, it seems to be about flipping out over your favorite
records, some of which probably sound something like this one and, if
they’re lucky, might be as good.
“Baby You’re the One”
by the Mole
(Wagon Repair)
Still finding stupendous pleasure in the Juan MacLean’s “Happy
House”? This record by pseudonymous Montreal producer the Mole isn’t as
overt, but its feel is in the same ballpark. Not its technique,
though—this is a track, not a song, a dirty-filtered disco loop
teasing out varying intervals of the title line for 13 and a half
minutes. It’s abstract, yes, and maybe not casual listening. But it
isn’t tiresome; maybe because like few records of its type, it
precisely evokes a packed floor at peak hour, up to and including the
quick-fire squiggle that brings the lead line in at full strength two
minutes from the end, just to jack the energy back up again before
collapsing for good.
“Don’t You Evah (Ted Leo’s I Want It Hotter
Remix)”
by Spoon
(Merge)
You can’t improve on perfection, and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a
perfect album. But you can turn it sideways—in this case,
changing none of the notes on that album’s latest single, but altering
their shape by transforming the song into a bass-led, dub-reggae crawl.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the best song on Ted Leo’s last
one had the most skank; maybe he ought to do an entire album of the
stuff. 