It’s Friday! Everybody drink!
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[7.00]
[9]
Jonathan Bogart: I’m never going to not enjoy tango-based dance music on some fundamental level, and these dudes have done a pretty good job of keeping their weird niche relevant since its early ’00s heyday. But there’s a big difference between sliding-scale relevance and being in any sense necessary.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Would be pleasant but forgettable if it weren’t for the dramatic build and ensuing strings-only moment near the end.
[6]
Iain Mew: Listening to this is like half-watching a familiar gentle comedy while you’re busy doing something else — it’s tempting to check out for quite long periods of time, but when you do remember to pay attention it’s easy to follow what’s happening and invariably raises a smile. It’s difficult to imagine them playing this and not having fun doing so (the puffed-up stride of those strings!), and it’s infectious.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: If Basement Jaxx were from Córdoba instead of Camberwell and were for some reason asked to jazz up the Come Dine With Me theme tune, you probably wouldn’t have this. But it’s hard to describe something when you have no real reference points, and this is a song (piece?) that really doesn’t give much of a handle to the unaccustomed. Obviously it doesn’t feel completely abstract, but all that’s really clear is this: it sounds quite nice. That and that the bassline sounds a bit like “Owner Of A Lonely Heart.”
[7]
Alfred Soto: Trevor Horn would have sold ABC to a sweatshop for these strings, electrofarts, and piano stabs — oh, that piano.
[7]
Rebecca A. Gowns: The deep glitchy (but simple) beat draws me in, then the other pieces come in: disco strings, bongos, cafe jazz piano, Romani violin, all borrowed shamelessly. Put together by Bajofondo, the effect is not so much haphazard as it is friendly! And that persistent glitchy sound keeps it from sounding too Starbucks-world-music-lite.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Weirdly, the spare, precise intro sounds like it was mistakenly placed there. Better to start with the disco string flourishes and dispense with the EQ’d humming early, yes? My desire for sumptuousness is betraying me.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Dance music, abstracted and extended, can become art music. Dance music, when left outside of the places where people dance, can become ossified. This attempts to work out what Dance music meant, and what it means without effort, but with a beauty that moves between the seamless and the jagged — the tension between disonance and assoance like two dancers across the floor.
[9]