MP3 of the Week - The Human Beinz: "Nobody But Me (Pilooski Edit)"

I really ought to have made this an mp3 of the week ages ago.

Remixes (and more recently, re-edits) of classic tunes are very often little more than exercises in gilding the lily. Of course, there are a few instances where such overhauls aren't completely superfluous, even if they never come close to supplanting the original, but it's still pretty rare to find a remix which enhances the source material to such an extent that the end product is better.



Pilooski's re-edit of 'Nobody But Me', the Human Beinz' 1967 cover of the old Isley Brothers tune, is a few years old now. Released on a white label in 2006 as part of the D.I.R.T.Y Sound System's essential 'Dark and Lovely' edits series, its limited availability makes it a fiendishly tough catch nowadays, even on the 'Dirty Edits Vol. 1' compilation (which wasn't much easier to get hold of either). For me, though, it's the best single of the noughties by miles, and one of the best remixes I've ever heard - it doesn't compromise the integrity of the original one bit, and actually manages to improve on it. Pilooski twists, warps and stretches the song into a snarling, swaggering, relentless beast of a tune, wrenching it from its freakbeat roots (check the YouTube clip above) and turning it into something closer to Neu!'s 'Hallogallo' on crystal meth - all juddering, motorik pulse and dubbed-out space-rock noise. I'm a fairly clean-living soul these days, yet whenever I listen to this, I'm overwhelmed with the urge to take drugs. Lots of them. In fact, on one occasion when I played it out in public, a young woman came over to the decks and, with a somewhat horrified expression on her face, said; "Can you please take off this fucking awful drug music?" The sort of ringing endorsement that's worth aspiring to.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a proper rock'n'roll record, and precisely the kind of thing modern rock bands should be using as a jump-off point. Those who refuse, or can't hack it, or who'd simply rather carry on pretending they're Joy Division, should have their instruments forcibly taken away from them and they should be made to work in some other field of endeavour, preferably one where being suffocatingly average is the minimum requirement, and is less likely to produce a blight on the cultural landscape.

The Human Beinz: Nobody But Me (Pilooski Edit) (Dark and Lovely Vol.3, 2006)

MP3 of the Week - Olivia Byington: "Lobo do Mar"

It's back! BACK!! BAAA*sniiiiiippp*

Despite my good intentions, this has turned out to be as regular a feature as a Jamie Carragher hat-trick, but I intend to rectify this over the next few weeks. So let's bring it back with something which is both absurdly obscure and a bit of a cracker, eh?

I've written about Brazilian music and (relatively speaking) my recently-developed enthusiasm for it on here before. Incidentally, I checked my Divshare account the other day, and discovered that those DJ Nuts links have had tons of downloads, so either someone's sharing them elsewhere (without even the courtesy of a comment, I might add), or this blog gets more traffic than I thought. Anyway, I digress. When you're as long in the tooth as I am, it's easy to get a bit jaded and start thinking you've heard all the good swag you're ever going to hear. Not true. I found this tune on the excellent Donna Slut mp3 blog, and found the album it's from on Loronix (check the blogroll). It features a lot of the things I like about Brazilian music - slightly melancholy, hippyish vibe, lots of interesting musical flourishes, and in the case of this tune, an overall feel not far removed from that of some lost prog-rock gem from somewhere in Northern Europe. The flute's very Tull, and it reminds me a little bit of female-fronted prog outfits like Earth and Fire or Atlantis. I know not much more than the sum total of fuck-all about Olivia Byington, other than that she used to sing with Brazilian proggers A Barca do Sol, and went on to have a long and distinguished solo career in her home country, where she still performs today. I wouldn't expect anyone to take much interest in the joy I find in discovering music that was being made half a world away, back when I thought Generation X were a big deal, but I can assure you that joy is substantial. Furthermore, I can offer no great insight into the cultural context of this song, and of course I don't understand a bloody word she's singing, but it sounds great on a day like today, when the sun's high in the sky and things (or some of them) seem exactly the way they ought to be. Enjoy.

Olivia Byington: Lobo do Mar ('Corra o Risco', 1978)

A Christmas Double Shot (Part 2)

Primal Scream are a band it isn't always easy to like. Their near-fundamentalist adherence to the tenets of The Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle can sometimes make them appear little more than a bunch of dicks suffering from an advanced case of arrested development rather than a group of people with a sincere belief in the redemptive power of music. Yet both live and on record, they're often capable of shoving such doubts right back down the throats of those who hold them. One of the best live shows I've ever seen was their performance at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool in April 2000. So often you'll hear bands say how they're influenced by this or that, or that their new direction is like X meets Y, and when you actually hear the end product, you wonder what the fucking hell they were talking about. But if Bobby Gillespie had said in 2000 that the new Primal Scream sound was like a Krautrock Stooges scrapping in a pub car-park with Sun Ra's Arkestra, Charles Mingus, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth...well, after that show, I'd have believed him, because that's exactly what they sounded like, and it was fucking astounding. I've seen them three times since, and they've never come close to matching the thrilling, terrifying, remorseless racket they made that night. They divided our party right down the middle and all; half thought it was near-transcendent in its magnificence. The other half thought it was a load of shite. Well, so long as you get a reaction, eh?

The album they were touring back then, XTRMNTR, is, for me, probably their best. I've never entirely bought the argument that Screamadelica is one of the great creative touchstones of late 20th century rock music, although I do like it. What's interesting when you play those two records alongside each other is just how radically different they are. Essentially, it's the same band on both albums, and this is the thing I admire most about Primal Scream; they don't stay in the same place for too long and, for a band that supposedly once typified the intensely conservative indie ethos of the 80s and 90s, this is pretty remarkable if you ask me.

They've also long been market leaders when it comes to mucking around with dance-music idioms, drafting in DJs and remixers like David Holmes, Andrew Weatherall and Jagz Kooner to not only remix their material, but to produce it as well. As a result, those less conventionally rock'n'roll/dancefloor aspects of their sound never give the impression of having been bolted-on as an afterthought for marketing purposes, as was often the case with some of their peers, back when "indie dance" was the buzzword of the day. Consequently, what you end up with is dance music which properly rocks out, and rock'n'roll with the kind of pilled-up, hip-twitching groove that today's pop kids are really diggin', daddy-o! Jagz Kooner's Spectre Mix of Swastika Eyes is absolutely fucking brutal. Imagine Neu! if they'd grown up on a Salford sink estate listening to nothing but Belgian techno from 1990 and Fun House by the Stooges. If you can't, then I suggest you play it as loud as you possibly can and find out what such a thing might have sounded like.

Primal Scream: Swastika Eyes [Spectre Mix] (single, 2000)

A Christmas Double Shot (Part 1)

I've been slacking off, and I plan on slacking off even more over the Christmas period, but since there wasn't an MP3 of the Week last week, I'm doubling up this week and throwing in an extra treat for Christmas.

In the spirit of the season, me and a few fellow internerds recently did a seasonal CD pool, whereby we divided ourselves up into groups and each person made a compilation for everyone in their respective group. In some cases (mine, for instance) it wasn't so much "seasonal" as "seasonally affected disorder", but it was interesting to learn a bit more about some of my friends' musical tastes, and it was fascinating to see where and how often they overlapped with my own. Not only that, I ended up with a lot of good music I mightn't have otherwise heard, and, all things being equal, hopefully they did too.

Anyway, although she wasn't in my group for the purposes of this lark, my friend Niki posted her compilation up on the net. Now Niki is an amazing woman, one of the most remarkable people I know; strong, fiercely intelligent, with a mind as big as God, and a heart to match. However, like many people when in the company of hardcore music geeks, she sometimes feels as if she needs to apologise for not having especially esoteric tastes. This is no big deal as far as I'm concerned, because I know she has good taste anyway, and one of the best things about this whole "make a CD for a few random friends" idea are those moments when you hear something you hadn't heard in years, in a way you'd never heard it before. So it was courtesy of Niki that, while wandering through the Covent Garden Xmas shopping chaos last weekend, "Let Me In" by the Osmonds came up on the iPod, and I really wasn't expecting it to have the kind of effect upon me that it did. I hesitate to use terms like "Proustian" to describe my reaction, but as I heard the song's opening line, followed by the strings playing a slow falling arpeggio with a warmth and richness worthy of Van Dyke Parks, I suddenly became...a little overwhelmed, shall we say. I was 13 again, and back in a world of unspoken teenage crushes, long summers and somewhat simpler (if occasionally guilty) pleasures.

The Osmonds got a bit of a raw deal in the 1970s. Even though they were enormously successful, and adored by countless teenage girls, it was clear they longed to be taken seriously as musicians and to receive the kind of critical plaudits that their immediate peers, the Jackson Five, were already enjoying. "Let Me In" was the lead single from "The Plan", a somewhat misfiring attempt at a prog-rock concept album, and was a much bigger hit in the UK than in the States, where their popularity had perhaps reached a plateau. When I hear it now, and its chorus swells to its gorgeous, heart-bursting peak, I no longer think about how fatally uncool it would have been at the time for a teenage boy to admit liking a song by the Osmonds, nor do I give any thought to what was then the hipster consensus, that it was all just saccharine MOR schmaltz. Instead, I hear something which doesn't contain the faintest trace of cynicism, and which wears its heart on its sleeve in a way that pop music rarely dares to do anymore. A little gem, in fact.

The Osmonds: Let Me In (The Plan 1973)

MP3 of the Week - The Mahavishnu Orchestra: "You Know You Know"

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have discovered the Mahavishnu Orchestra via their appearance on BBC2's In Concert series in 1972. Not knowing much about music at that age, I was impressed more by the speed of their playing rather than what it was they played, and the combined musical pedigree of the various members didn't really register much with me either. Still, the performance was enough to have me seeking out their second album, Birds Of Fire, pretty much upon its release. There are a multitude of clips from the broadcast on YouTube and, while the term "ground-breaking jazz-rock-fusion" alone will be enough to send some people running, screaming, to the hills, it has to be said that, along with Tony Williams' Lifetime (of which Mahavishnu John McLaughlin was a member), they more or less wrote the book. They ended up becoming victims of their own somewhat unprecedented success, though, and the original line-up dissolved in 1973, due to internal strife which bassist Rick Laird later described as "too many chiefs and not enough Indians".

What I like about their stuff now, which I didn't get at all at the time, is its intensity and euphoria. Sure, it's incredibly complex on a technical level, and a lot more structured and disciplined than it might sometimes appear but, at its best, you do get the sense of a group of musicians genuinely aiming for something transcendent. Their instinctive jazzer's tendency towards improvisation could easily have led them into a world of jam-band tedium, something that disciples of theirs such as the Mars Volta occasionally fall foul of. Even now it can sound a little too full-on sometimes, but quite a lot of their stuff has held up well, as the good stuff generally does.

This tune from their debut album "The Inner Mounting Flame" is amongst the easiest to digest for non-believers - a simple circular melody over a spare, funky groove, which steadily builds in intensity without over-complicating itself, and is a great example of how effective they could be when they took their foot off the gas for five minutes. Fans of Massive Attack may like to pay particular attention at the 1'54" mark...

The Mahavishnu Orchestra: You Know You Know (The Inner Mounting Flame, 1971)

MP3 of the Week - Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin"

This record cost me a (then) prohibitively expensive £1.50 on a French Skydog import when I bought it from Probe Records in Liverpool during the summer of 1977. I can't remember whether the person who actually sold it to me was a future pop star or not, but Probe being what it was around that time, the odds are it probably would have been.

If you're anything like me, you're probably sick of reading a seemingly endless stream of absolute guff about how this bunch of herberts or that shower of slumming Tristram Trustfunders are this week's Living Embodiment of the True Spirit of Rock'n'Roll - they're dangerous, they're wild, they bunk taxis, they date fashion models, they appear in the gossip weeklies, and they all look exactly the fucking same. Invariably, when you hear the music, it sounds just as you'd imagine from a band who've probably hired a PR company first and built everything else arse-backwards from there. It therefore becomes difficult to imagine that any such band would ever - indeed, could ever - make a record as terrifyingly, psychotically good as this as long as they had holes in their arses.

Recorded sometime in 1972 by my favourite Stooges line-up - Iggy, Ron Asheton on bass, his brother Scott on drums, and the great, great James Williamson on guitar - but unreleased until around five years later, "Gimme Some Skin" sounds less the work of a rock band than it does the end product of supplying musical instruments and studio time to a gang of delinquents, sociopaths and sexual perverts. Iggy's vocal sounds depraved, becoming ever more hysterical to the point where he's almost literally gibbering by the final verse. Scott Asheton pounds the kit like he just caught it robbing his stash, and Williamson's primitive, slashing riffs are closer to threats of violence than to music. It probably cost about $50 to record, and it sounds completely out of control. There was a particular reason the Stooges remained at the fringes of the music scene for as long as they did; they disgusted people, and it isn't difficult to hear why. Every time some knobber has tried to convince me that, say, "Appetite For Destruction" is a great rock'n'roll record because it supposedly signalled the death of Corporate Rock - as if a record that sold 28 million copies could signal the death of anything - I'd have loved to have played them this. Over thirty-five years after it was recorded, it still sounds as if you could catch something unpleasant just by listening to it.

Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin" (1972)

Gold And Popcorn's Inaugural MP3 of the Week.

I'm going to try to make this a regular item. It shouldn't need much explaining, really; each week, I'll endeavour to post something good, or at least interesting, from the bowels of the external hard drive. And so we begin.

Patrick "Sleepy" Brown is one-third of the God-like Atlanta hip-hop/r&b production house known as Organized Noise. You might know him as the Ving Rhames-lookin' geezer who sings the hook on Outkast's "The Way You Move". He's also a solo artist in his own right, although his fortunes in that area have been a little chequered, courtesy of Tha Politricks Of Tha Bizniz. His records are worth picking up if you happen upon them, although they seem to be a bit thin on the ground this side of the Atlantic.

I've upped probably my favourite track off his independently-released "The Vinyl Room" from 1998, which came out under the artist name Sleepy's Theme, for what I assume to be contractual reasons. I was put up on the album by a gent on the now-deceased Boundless NY messageboard who used to post under the name Feedback Loop, so all credit is due, because it's a fucking great album and I'm sure I'm not the only person whose radar it sailed right under. "Curse On You" is soulful, languid, yet slightly menacing in that "Every Breath You Take"/restraining-order-pending kind of way. The Organized Noise m.o. is evident from the jump - the characteristic blend of live instrumentation and head-bop programming, and the kind of swampy, atmospheric groove which has you reaching for cliches like "Southern-fried", "dripping with chicken grease", etc., etc. I'd love to be able to tell you where you can get hold of the album, but I still haven't formulated an official blog policy as regards offering up someone else's shit for download (he said, offering up someone else's shit for download...). All I will say is; a) Google Blog Search is your friend, and b) buy the album if you do manage to find it anywhere.

Sleepy's Theme: Curse On You (The Vinyl Room, 1998)