Fave Records of 1997

TIMBALAND AND MAGOO

"Up Jumps Da' Boogie"

Welcome To Our World (Blackground/Atlantic)

AALIYAH

"One In A Million" (Blackground/Atlantic)

MISSY ELLIOT

"Sock It To Me" b/w "Supa Dupa" (Elektra)

BLACKSTREET

"No Diggity" (Interscope)

QUEEN PEN

"Man Behind The Music" (Interscope)

The most sonically astonishing and pure-pleasure-intensive music coming out America in '97 was the stuff spawned in the rumpshaker interzone between uptempo pop rap and hard R&B/swingbeat. Teddy Riley and Timbaland outshone, out-avanted and outfunked "proper" hip hop (and revealed The RZA to be a one-trick pony), while the videos's sub-hallucinatory ultra-vivid colour-schemes, fish-eye distortions and Dali-Barbera surrealism made hardcore rap's monochrome fetishisation of the "real" seem drab and done-to-death overnight. (Busta Rhymes, take a bow also). From Big Beat to speed garage, Puffy to Missy to nouveau ska, this was a year of good times music; overnight, the entire darkside paradigm of pre-millenium tension and blunted paranoia was jettisoned, consigned to the pop-historical scrapheap, leaving the likes of Wu Tang, Tricky and techstep looking like Jeremiahs out of work and out of step with the Zeitgeist. Maybe it's just a knock-on effect of the economic boom, or just an inevitable reaction against post-grunge/post-rave gloom, but the pleasure-principled party-hard ethos felt like a blessed relief, a welcome injection of energy.

Highlights: Aaliyah's Timbaland-and-Missy produced "One In A Million", with its jungle-at-ballad-tempo stop-start beats twisting your torso and stuttering triple-time kickdrums pummelling the solar-plexus. (And Aaliyah's thankfully restrained when it comes to swingbeat's cardinal drawback, excessively nuanced and melismatic singing); Blackstreet's "No Diggity", a sublimely inventive blend of roots 'n' future, featuring the most exhilirating enunciated utterance of the year--Queen Pen's "we be the baddest clique" (a slice of super-slurred slanguage so succulent she just had to slip it to us one more time on her solo debut "Man Behind The Music"). Above all, Timbaland & Magoo's "Up Jumps Da' Boogie"-- every cranny of the mixscape infested with eerie nuances, grating drone-loops, lewd squiggles and funky quivers; cyberfunk as an animated audio-frieze of gratuitous grotesquery. And let's not forget that strange subliminal lyric that goes "see the white man scared/of the black man's power". This R&B/swingbeat/urban contemporary stuff is the blackest shit on the planet, with the possible exception of ragga--no white producers, no white influences; wigga rap fans who get off on the radical chic of Wu-Tang just don't get it at all. As a white bohemian/lapsed socialist, I still find the designer-label commodity-fetishism and conspicious consumption, the Hennesy-swigging and Rolex-brandishing element, a bit hard to handle--but even that gives it a weird sort of transgressive late-capitalist edge, a la Bataille's sumptuary-expenditure-without-return/will-to-extravagance.

RESILIENT

"1.2"

MONOLAKE

"Lantau" b/w "Macao"

PORTER RICKS

Biokinetics

VAINQUEUR

Elevations

MAURIZIO

Maurizio CD

VARIOUS ARTISTS [group name!]

Decay Product

MONOLAKE

Hongkong

(all the above on Chain Reaction)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

"No.8/No.8.5/No.9" (Fatcat Records)

PORTER RICKS

Porter Ricks(Mille Plateaux)

GAS

Gas

Zauberberg(both Mille Plateaux)

BURGER/INK

"Twelve Miles High" from "Las Vegas, Pt 2" EP (Harvest)

Chain Reaction and CR-style "heroin house" is house pared down and distilled to its essence. No songs (at the end of the day house music is not going to be remembered for its contribution to the sum of "great songs"), no vocals(ditto), no melodies, sometimes even no beats. Which leaves just dub-space, texture and rhythm. Or rather, texture-rhythm as an indivisible prima materia--articulated as scintillator-riffs, smeary timbre-vamps, glow-pulses and flicker-stabs. Texture-rhythm molded and extruded to form an enfolding plasma-scape. (This is some chora/semiotic pulsions/body-without-organs bizness, dig?). That velcro-stickiness of sound that seems to suction-cup your skin surface, tantalising your goosebumps erect and tugging at your blood like a lunar-magnetic tractor beam. That becoming-porous, becoming-vapor feeling. It's like MDMA sensations put through an abstraction-machine and transformed into a kind of crinkly, shimmery audio-fabric; the quintessence of that shiver-up-the-spine, champagne-for-blood feeling encoded in sound, a bliss-space you can access at any time, immerse yourself in and then leave without cost or comedown. Heard at its utmost and outermost in Various Artist's "No. 8" and Resilient's drum-less "1.2": the latter being my favourite track of 1997, a slow-mo tsunamai of vein-suffusing, ego-melting, body-boundary haemorrhaging bliss. A soundtrack in waiting for the first zero-gravity nightclub.

FAZE ACTION

Plans & Designs(Nuphonic)

Could the producers, arrangers and song-doctors of Philly and Salsoul have ever, in their wildest, most self-aggrandising dreams, imagined that one day there would be such a thing as "classicist disco"? That's what Faze Action's Robin & Simon Lee (brothers, not a typo) are. Like Brian Jones and Keith Richards poring over their blues records, Faze Action are purist scholars of the form -- for them the Salsoul Orchestra is Howlin' Wolf and Walter Gibbons is Muddy Waters. Plans & Designs's near eleven-minute title track-- an art-disco percussadelic symphony of tremor-rendous timpani and melodramatic violas, violins and cellos--is the best thing of its ilk since Dinosaur L's "Go Bang" (Arthur Russell at his Van McCoy-meets-Steve Reich peak). Cool CD packaging too, with the silver disc coming in an inner cardboard sleeve just like a vinyl 12 inch.

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS

Dig Your Own Hole(Junior Boy's Own/Astralwerks)

All year long I've heard and read the accusation levelled at the Chems by Everyhipster --that they're a middlebrow soft-option for student discos, that they're cliche-peddling cheese-vendors pandering to low-com-denom party-hard instincts, that (like The Prodigy) they represent the rock-ification of techno. But if the snotty-minded actually heard the best bits of Dig Your Own Hole in another context (i.e. not Big Beat or Electronica), heard them unidentified, I bet they'd be rushing up to the DJ booth shrieking 'whatdafuck is that amazing toon?" and craning their necks to get a glimpse of the label. "It Doesn't Matter", for instance, is an awesomely monolithic mantra-stomp of EQed-and-filtered-to-fuck house that compares very favourably with the raw-to-the-core underground "trackhead" house of DJ Sneak/DJ Rush/Gene Farris et al. Admittedly there are a tad too many tracks on Dig Your Own Hole that cane to death the fastbreaks-phatbass-acidriffs-oldskoolrapvocal formula that Rowlands & Simons perfected with "Loops Of Fury"; hence the self-parodic hackwork of "Block Rockin' Beats'. But the second half of "Elektrobank", with its roiling maelstrom of dying-walrus-howls distortion, sounds like a breakbeat Butthole Surfers. And even the explicit lapses into ye olde rock songcraft and neo-psych guitarwooze--"Setting Sun", "The Private Psychedelic Reel",and "Where Do I Begin"--are brilliant, especially the latter with its Beth Orton post-E disorientation vocal/lyric. In a year in which post-rock dwindled into noodly, no-fun inconsequence [see Over-Rated of 1997], the Chems and the Skint acts offered post-rock'n'roll--the we-wanna-get-loaded-and-get-our-rocks-off, teenage kicks and cheap thrills spirit of rock'n'roll intensified and abstracted by being fed through rave culture's desiring machinery.

DAFT PUNK

Homework(Virgin)

Homework is patchy, but at its high points (and in its wonderfully wonky live reinterpretation --which I caught at the Roseland Ballroom this fall), this album offers the purest distillation of the rush. The kitschadelic aspect ("Around The World", "Da Funk") wears thin quite rapidly, in my experience; the pure science (those itchy subdermal MDMA-simulator sounds they use on "Rollin' & Scratchin' and "Rock'n'Roll") is more compelling, triggering fleshy-flashbacks to nights of XTC. But why wasn't "Musique"--their finest, wild-pitch-iest moment--included on the album?

FATBOY SLIM

Better Living Through Chemistry (Skint/Astralwerks)

BENTLEY RHYTHM ACE

Bentley Rhythm Ace (Skint/Astralwerks)

See 'Skint Alive' piece elsewhere on this site for full appreciation of the Skint messthetic. Here let me just add that Norman Cook (Norman fucking Cook of all people!!!) and BRA have proved that being clever and being stupid-fresh fun are not incompatible. Better Living contains some of the most craftily designed and consummately executed audio-japes since... prime Madness, really. "Punk To Funk" is not only a barrel of laffs, it's one of the most peculiarly constructed grooves I've heard in years. For a small eternity, just chunky breaks and obese bass wobbling like love handles at a Weight-Watchers disco, until the slow fade-up of that cheese-tastic Carry On.../Man About The House horn section, huffing-and-puffing and blowing the roof off the sucker. The highpoint of BRA's album is "Return of the Hardcore Jumble Carbootechnodisco Roadshow": simply one of the best productions of the late Nineties, with every element there to put a smile on your face and a wiggle in your hips. Like some dream fusion of The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" and Josh Wink's "Higher State Of Consciousness", like Primal Scream's "Loaded" fed through the proto-jungle amphetamine-frenzy of SL2's "On A Ragga Tip", this track sounds at once out-of-time and of-the-moment, 1966-freakbeat meets 1997-bigbeat.

REQ

req::one (Skint)

Could this be that oxymoron-in-waiting, "intelligent big beat"? Req is the brainy, arty wallflower in Skint's company of lagered-up jackanapes and jesters. An old skool skolar with a background in graffiti (Req = "wreck" = old B-boy slanguage, geddit?), Mr. Req sees his music as the audio extension of his aerosol activities. If all this sounds alarmingly close to Mo' Wax style fetishism (all those faded trainers and fusty breaks), at its best req: one resembles an ambient version of Schoolly D's first album. A second album is due February 1998, apparently.

SOURCE DIRECT

"Two Masks" b/w "Black Domina"

"Call & Response" b/w "Computer State"

"Enemy Lines" b/w "Capital D"

(all Science)

Controlled Developments US-only mini-LP (Science/Astralwerks)

Why do I so much prefer Source Direct to Photek when they are both so patently "clones" of each other (as Goldie put it). The pick of the litter of their '97 output --"Enemy Lines", with its poison-gas pall of amorphous synth-doom--is as dank and lugubrious as anything on Modus Operandi. But SD's brittle, full-kit fracture-funk has a neurotic exuberance to it that Mr. Parkes has only achieved on "The Water Margin" and his remix of "Still Life". And I like the way Source Direct give props to rave and talk about wanting people to go mad on the dancefloor like they did at the hardcore parties they threw as teenagers.

CRESCENT

Electronic Sound Constructions (Snapshot)

Infinitely superior to the muddy first LP, this Bristol-nexus unrock/postrock outfit (allies of FSA, Amp, Broadcast, Third Eye Foundation) here sound variously like Sun Ra's "Disco 3000" versioned at the Black Ark, like the missing link between Tago Mago-era Can ("Augmn", "Peking O") and Miles Davis's "He Loved Him Madly", like DJ Shadow walking through the Valley of the Shadows. Alright, maybe not that good, but the ague-riddled analog synths and cavernous echo-box malaise make for an appealingly odd slice of lo-fi electro-acoustica.

VARIOUS ARTISTS/MR C

Electronic Warfare (Plink Plonk)

At its best (God of the Machine's "Fog of the Unknown" --great title, or what?--and "Nude Machinery"), this tech-house stuff is so spangly-clean and pearly-pert, so crisply produced and shimmervescent, you feel like you've already done an E. At its not-infrequent least, though, tech-house is the most redundantly refined, cheese-less and subtlety-riddled blend of Detroit-pietism and UK house connoisseurism yet heard, the deadest of deadening ends.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Sound Of The Hoover: Energy Anthems 92-97 (TEC)

A comp that covers a similar three-or-four year timespan as Electronic Warfare, this is the perfect antidote to tech-house's insipid tastefulness. It's shamelessly bangin', slammin' and kickin'. Mining a seam of sound whose existence I'd barely suspected--call it trance-core, but don't confuse it with the happy hardcore subgenre of the same name--the best tracks here (Illuminatae's "Tremora Del Terra", Trope's "Amphetamine", Nexus 6's "Tres Chic", Commander Tom's almighty "Are Am Eye", stuff by Sourmash, Demonic Emotions, Karlton and TDV) join the dots between "Mentasm", "Hardtrance Acperience", Arpeggiator's "Freedom of Experience" and the kind of butt-bumpin' Nu NRG they used to play at Trade. Although the "Hoover" in the title pays homage to the Brooklyn-Belgian hardcore of 1991--Human Resource's "Dominator", T99's "Anasthasia", Frank De Wulf, 80 Aum, Beltram and Mundo Muzique--there aren't actually that many hoover-riffs or mentasm-stabs to be heard. What you do get is trance without Goa's ethnodelic filigree or Megatripolis-style "taking you on a journey" cyber-twaddle; trance whose priorities are making you rush your fucking bollox off.

DAVID TOOP

Spirit World (Virgin)

Toop has recently retired from what he reckons is the "absurdity" of criticism in order to devote all his energy to the "potency" of experimental musicianship. Hmmm -- see, I thought the problem was actually the other way around: too much "good" music about, not enough visionary writing to make it all seem like it matters. Rather than an ancillary, supplementary, parasitical adjunct to the "real creativity", the leading edge of music-writing (of which Toop is definitely a component) has always been for me as much of a trip as the music itself. Still, if he's dedicating himelf to creating oneiric, polytendrilled, timbral extravaganzas like this one, good luck to him.

THE THIRD EYE FOUNDATION

Sound of Violence EP (Domino)

Derek Bailey meets Squarepusher; drill & bass as torture chamber (I'm gonna get medi-eeval on yo ass") rather than whimsy-mired buffooneery. My only problem with Third Eye's appropriation of jungle is that at heart he's an industrial musician: as white, expressionistic and faux-transgressive (I mean "Sound of Violence" -- "intense" or what?) as Trent Reznor (whose jungle-ish "Perfect Drug" was almost great, only marred by the anthemic chorus). If you slowed down TEF's 200 b.p.m. woody-woodpecker snare tattoos, you'd find beats as rigid, rectilinear and funkless as Einsturzende or Test Dept. Still, some truly horrible and distressing sample-tones--kittens being boiled alive?--make up for any dearth of da funk.

TO ROCOCO ROT

Veiculo(City Slang)

Sort of Seefeel-meets-Sakomoto; brittle melodiousness, vulvatronic pulsescapes of trembly timbres, glitch-riffs and chime-tics. Post-rock that's so post- it isn't really anything to do with rock anymore. Almost good enough to slot alongside the Chain Reaction lot.

MAUSE

Teen Riot Gunther--Strackture (Morbid)

Austrian quirk-funk in the vicinity of the Sabotage neo-Dada zone, this album is one of the most entertaining and polyfaceted oddities I've heard this year. One minute they're fusing pre-disco DAF with La Dusseldorf, the next they're moog-riffing and Rhodes-vamping like the kind of Seventies jazz-funk obscurities that inspire jazzstep junglists like Flytronix, Dave Wallace and Jacob's Optical Stairway. They do an electro/LFO/bleep & bass track based around a Faust loop! Only the Germanic races can get away with this kind of whimsy.

FLEETWOOD MAC

The Dance(Reprise; VH1 live show)

The goddess Stevie vindicated, and visibly basking in the glory. Her "Silver Springs"--equal to anything on Rumours but relegated out of spite to the B-side of "Go Your Own Way", her estranged lover Lindsay Buckingham's fuck-you ditty--finally has its day, audible everyfuckingwhere--radio, supermarket, clothes boutiques, and on endless repeat play on VH1 --where her searing, dagger-eyed performance directed at Buckingham utterly convinces that sparks still fly, wounds are unhealed and issues remain unresolved between the starcrossed lovers. And of course she's playing for the cameras, hamming it up something glorious. But it's pop mythology at its most potent and compelling. And what a song!

Funny how nobody has the slightest interest in the marital vicissitudes of John and Christine McVie, isn't it?

RONI SIZE/REPRAZENT

New Forms(Talkin' Loud/Mercury)

"New Forms (Roni Size Remix)/Share The Fall (Grooverider Jeep Mix)" (Talkin' Loud)

For sure, New Forms is to '97 what Timeless was to '95 and Logical Progression to '96--the year's drum & bass consensus album, the double-disc magnum opus garlanded with critical acclaim and hyped with the dubious sales-pitch "if you only buy one jungle album this year....". That's reason enough for some to hate the record, dismissing it (often, I suspect, without actually hearing it) as mere coffee table jungle-lite. Winning the Mercury Prize award ought to be the death knell for Reprazent's underground cred. And it is an exceedingly pleasant-sounding, cleanly-produced record that pays a little too much deference to jazz and the ideal of live musicianship.

But then white bohemians (myself included) have never truly grasped why the likes of LTJ Bukem glimpse utopia in the jazz-funk of Lonnie Liston Smith and Roy Ayers, why Goldie flips out for the fuzak of The Yellowjackets and mid-Eighties Miles Davis. New Forms is a timely reminder that elegance can be a form of rebellion for the black working class (rather than a straightforwardly upwardly mobile aspiration to conventional notions of "class"). From Earth Wind and Fire and Chic to today's G-funk, swingbeat and speed garage, the regal panache and sheer slickness of sound communicate a kind of fuck-you defiance, a refusal of your allotted place in the social pyramid. Like "Big Willie"/Notorious BIG/playa rap's commodity fetishism (Hillfiger, Cristal, Rolexes, Hennesy, Lexus et al), the trappings of sonic luxury --stand-up bass, lush strings and jazzed cadences--that infuse New Forms proclaim: "nothing's too good for us".

When electronic musicians attempt a synthesis of sequenced sound with "musicality" ("real" vocals, "live" playing), the result is usually an embarassing mish-mash; witness the worst bits of Timeless. If New Forms mostly escapes that dire fate, it's because Size/Reprazent are minimalists where Goldie is a maximalist. Reprazent understand that the real "jazz thing" going on in drum & bass doesn't involve sampling electric piano licks or hiring a session-musician to noodle out a sax solo. Rather, it resides in the rhythm section--the tangential relationship between the hyper-syncopated breakbeats and the roaming, ruminative but always visceral B-line. Strip away the stereo-panned streaks of abstract tone-color and the Pat Metheny-style guitar glints from "Matter of Fact", for instance, and the track is basically a rimshot-ricochetting, paradiddle-palsied drum solo (albeit one constructed painstakingly over days of red-eyed computer-screen toil rather than played in real-time and real acoustic space).

The first disc of New Forms contains all the "big tunes", as well as the most overt nods towards jazz: the double bass driven "Brown Paper Bag", the title track with its tongue-twistingly sibilant scat-rap from Bahamadia (which was psychedelicized and susurrated even further on the superior Roni Size remix released as a single), the gorgeous singles "Heroes" and "Share The Fall" (both graced by the torch-song croon of Onalee). "Share The Fall" isn't as good a song as "Heroes", but it's better jungle: singing inside your flesh, the beat is the melody, its rolling tumble of rapid-fire triplets making you step fierce like a bebop soldier.

Disc Two of New Forms is more cinematic and soundtrack-to-life oriented, achieving a widescreen feel and Technicolor sheen rivalled only by Spring Heel Jack. "Trust Me", for instance, sounds like it might be woven out of offcuts from Dudley Moore's symphonic jazz score for his Sixties movie Bedazzled. Truer to the anonymous funktionalism of "real" jungle, the tracks on Disc Two strip away song-structures and "proper" vocals to reveal a music of lustrous details. Drum & bass is an engineer's art, oriented around specifications and special effects, timbres and treatments. So what you listen for is the sculpted rustle-and-glisten of hi-hat and cymbal figures, the contoured plasma of the bass, the exquisitely timed placement of horn stabs and string cascades. You thrill to the music's murderous finesse--intricacies and subleties designed to enhance the ganjadelic mind-state but which are so nuanced and three-dimensional they stone you all by themselves.

In Reprazent's music, the clash between the ghettocentric exuberance of the breakbeats and the opulent arrangements generates oxymoronic mood-amalgams: tense serenity, suave unease, fervent ambivalence. Tracks like the eerie, menthol-cool "Hot Stuff" modulate your metabolism like the impossibly refined neurochemical engineering and designer drugs of the next century. New forms, for sure--but Roni Size/Reprazent are also forging new emotions.