Day 205

Lately I’ve been getting back into Delakota, a late nineties band, and I’d ordered a few of their CDs and remixes to finish my collection, and their arrived today:

Delakota mixed rock ‘n’ roll with hip-hop and samples and big beat, which the NME termed ‘skunk rock’. It was a kinda updated Screamadelica sound, with hip-hop replacing house, a kinda chilled out post-baggy sound. It’s a very summery, late evening sound. Turn it up loud and you’ve got a party, have it on in the background and you get a nice jazz club vibe going. Dig?

Their remixes of David Holmes (Don’t Die Just Yet EP) and Tom Jones & The Cardigans (Burning Down The House EP) aren’t bad and add a certain swing to each track. Which is impressive as it’s hard to improve on Don’t Die Just Yet, which is just a great piece of music (although the Mogwai remix of Don’t Die Just Yet, is a near-perfect piece of music, that I could listen too for hours and hours). While they give Burning Down The House more funk.

I also listened to the Cheery Red reissue of Bomb the Bass Into The Dragon LP, which is a classic late eighties album, using the newly available technology to mix samples, hip-hop and house music together. It also suffers the curse of late eighties albums in that some of the tracks are repeated in slightly different forms/versions (Beat Dis (U.S. 7" Mix) and Beat Dat (Freestyle Scratch Mix) and Megablast (Rap Version) and Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13, but when they are such classics as Beat Dis and Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13) it seems churlish to complain. 

The reissue adds a couple of extra mixes and to paraphrase the intro to Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13), “there have been mixes and dance tracks put together in the past but done can out run or equal the power of” Bomb the Bass. If you want to hear the excitement and fun that acid house and samples brought to UK music this is a great album to start with.

I also caught up a little with my comics reading:

In Renato Jones Season 2 #3 we reach a climax where Renato faces his concerns and renews (and maybe changes) his approach tackling the Ones, while the new POTUS is making shocking decisions, one of which is so shocking that I can’t reveal it here! This issue nicely combines satire of the actual POTUS and broad depictions of the Ones, with something more personal, about how far Renato/Church/you are willing to go to do what one feels is right. 

Shipwreck #5 ramps up the action and explanations as we’re in the home stretch and Dr Shipwright is almost home. There’s a nice moment when one of the characters points out that Dr Shipwright, our hero, is, to the people of this Earth, an alien invader and that maybe our hero isn’t a hero or even an anti-hero. The only complaint (and it’s a minor one) I have is that this issue reads very much as chapter 5 in a 6-part story, rather than a complete story in itself, but I’m looking forward to reading all the chapters in one go.